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Whitehead,  Henry  St.  Clair, 

1882- 
The  garden  of  the  Lord 


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THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 


REV.   HENRY   S.   WHITEHEAD 


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m 


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i^G/CALSBV>     I 


THE  GARDEN  OF 
THE  LORD 


THE  REV.  HENRY  S.  WHITEHEAD,  M.  A. 


Publishers  DORRANCE       Philadelphia 


pill 


iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii 


Copyright  1922 
OoRRANCE  &  Company  Inc 


PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


TO 
GEORGE  PEABODY  GARDNER,  ESQ. 


INTRODUCTION 

Five  of  the  following  Chapters  (Chs.  V, 
VIII,  IX,  X,  and  XI)  have  been  published  as 
separate  articles  in  The  American  Church 
Monthly.  To  the  publisher  of  that  periodical, 
Mr.  Edwin  S.  Gorham,  the  author  gratefully 
acknowledges  permission  to  reproduce  them 
here. 

This  book  is  not  addressed  primarily  to  the 
clergy,  but  rather  to  that  large  public  which, 
at  least  in  the  Anglican  Communion,  vigorously 
asserts  its  interest  in  the  Church  and  in  her 
clergy  and  lay  workers.  It  is  neither  a  theolog- 
ical treatise  nor  a  handbook  on  parochial  ef- 
fectiveness, although  it  necessarily  treats  of 
theological  matters  and  is  concerned  chiefly 
with  parochial  affairs,  and  methods  of  Church 
work. 

It  attempts  to  bring  together  and  present  as 
a  cognate  whole  the  various  facts,  conditions, 
and  objects  of  criticism  which  are  listed  near 
the  end  of  Chapter  I.  It  is  intended  to  be 
wholly  practical,  and  to  deal  primarily  with 
matters  not  commonly  touched  upon  even  by 
writers  of  handbooks.  If  it  shall  serve  to  stim- 
ulate in  the  direction  of  the  reforms  which  are 
indicated,  it  will  have  succeeded  in  its  purpose ; 
and  it  is  offered  to  its  readers  in  the  single  hope 
that  in  however  inconsiderable  a  fashion,  it  may 
contribute  to  the  furtherance  of  clear  thought 
about  problems  connected  with  God's  Holy 
Catholic  Church. 

Henry  S.  Whitehead 

CHURCH  OF  THE  ADVENT,  BOSTON, 
LENT,   1922. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

I.  Cultivating  the  Loed's  Garden...  13 

II.  A  Neglected  Source  of  Information  28 

III.  On  ^'Efficiency" 40 

IV.  Knowing  One's  Sheep  50 

V.  On  Church-Going   63 

VI.  The  Question  of  Clerical  Marriage    77 

VII.  Ceremonial  in   the  Anglican   Re- 
vival        93 

VIII.  Work  Among  Foreigners 108 

IX.  The   Implications   of   an   Ancient 

Rhyme 118 

X.  The  Cheer-Up  Philosophy 128 

XI.  God,  the  Clergy,  and  Some  Modern 

Writers 137 

XII.  A  Task  for  Seminarians  148 

XIII.  Sample  Christians   160 


THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 


THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

I 

Cultivating  the  Lord's  Gabdbn 

One  of  the  fables  which  was  rarely  left 
out  of  old-fashioned  children's  '' Headers" 
told  of  a  king  who  summoned  his  sages 
into  his  presence,  and,  selecting  two  of  the  wis- 
est, sent  out  the  first  to  make  a  tour  of  his 
kingdom,  to  take  note  of  all  the  flowers  he  might 
see,  and  report  at  the  end  of  the  year.  The 
second  was  commissioned  to  report  on  all  the 
weeds  and  noxious  vegetable  growths  at  the 
same  time  as  his  fellow.  When  the  king  re- 
ceived the  two  sages  at  the  end  of  the  year, 
he  asked  the  first  if  he  had  observed  anything 
of  interest  besides  flowers  which  he  might  wish 
to  include  in  his  report.  ''Sire,"  replied  the 
sage,  "so  occupied  was  I  in  carrying  out  thy 
behest  that  after  the  first  few  days  I  saw  noth- 
ing but  flowers.  Verily  this  is  a  right  glorious 
kingdom,  for  there  is  no  valley  that  is  not 
carpeted  with  flowers,  no  mountain-side  which 
does  not  glow  in  the  rays  of  the  declining  sun, 
as  they  reflect  innumerable  glories  of  rich  color 
from  the  masses  of  flowering  shrubs. ' ' 

A  similar  question  was  put  to  the  other  sage. 
"Sire,"  replied  he,  sadly,  "it  is  with  me  even 

13 


14        THE  GAEDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

as  with  my  brother,  save  that  I  marvel  greatly 
at  his  report.  For  truly  I  saw  none  of  the 
glories  he  describes!  Throughout  this  whole 
land  there  is  naught  but  a  great  curse  of  weeds, 
which  the  high  gods  have  sent  upon  us,  doubt- 
less for  our  sins.  Through  the  length  and 
breadth  of  the  kingdom  nothing  did  I  see  but 
poisonous  and  ugly  weeds,  choking  the  good 
soil  and  making  wretched  the  lives  of  the  hus- 
bandmen. ' ' 

Now  it  is  sufficiently  obvious  that  both  these 
views,  widely  held  about  the  Lord's  garden, 
the  Church,  are  wrong.  The  modern  mind 
sees  little  in  the  fable  beyond  the  lesson  which 
the  king  learned — that  preoccupation  often  lies 
at  the  root  of  unconsciously  warped  opinions. 
In  a  real  garden  there  are  always  both  weeds 
and  flowers  and  homely  vegetables,  as  well  as 
certain  negative  growths,  like  grass.  The  cul- 
tivation of  a  garden,  as  a  constructive  art,  can- 
not be  carried  on  effectively  without  the  cor- 
respondingly destructive  process  of  rooting 
out  the  weeds.  In  the  perfect  gardener  there 
must  be  an  ideal  combination  of  the  construc- 
tive— planting — faculty,  with  the  destructive — 
the  weed-uprooting — faculty.  The  more  the 
gardener  desires  to  produce,  however  enam- 
oured he  may  be  of  the  constructive  side  of  his 
art,  the  more  must  he  devote  himself  to  the 
destruction  of  weeds  and  noxious  growths. 
This  part  of  the  work  is  the  distressful  part. 
It  is  not  'inspiring"  to  dig  out  weeds,  nor  is 
it  an  easy  or  congenial  task,  especially  for  one 
who  looks  ahead  towards  the  greater  and  finer 
results  of  the  task  as  a  whole.    But  it  must  be 


CULTIVATING  THE  GARDEN         15 

done  or  the  garden  will  not  flourish  and  the 
successive  crops  will  be  less  and  less  useful  and 
lovely. 

To  anyone  who  pauses  to  look  about  him  in 
the  Garden  of  the  Lord,  in  the  intervals  of  his 
deputized  gardening,  the  weeds  must  always  be 
an  object  of  interest.  There  they  are  with 
their  ugly  heads  showing,  their  harsh  stems 
bristling  to  choke  out  the  good  plants,  their 
deep,  quick-spreading  roots  sucking  out  the 
nourishment  from  the  ground  all  about,  and 
getting  tangled  with  the  roots  of  the  good 
plants.  It  is  a  nasty  job  to  root  them  out,  a 
back-breaking  job,  sometimes;  but  out  they 
must  come,  for  the  good  of  the  garden. 

Perhaps  as  good  a  way  as  any  to  get  abruptly 
to  the  task  is  to  remember  that  a  question  like 
this  is  often  posed  in  a  public  way:  ''Do  you 
want  to  make  Anglicans  out  of  the  whole 
world?"  This  question  is  apt  to  be  put  in  one 
form  or  another  every  so  often.  There  are  two 
points  about  it  worth  noting.  First,  that  from 
its  nature,  it  is  the  typical  question  put  by  one 
who  does  not  dislike  weeds,  who  thinks  that 
weeds  should  be  allowed  to  grow  and  even  to 
be  fostered  (or,  at  the  very  least,  let  alone), 
and  that  such  effort  as  might  be  stimulated  by 
the  presence  of  weeds  should  be  directed  to 
understanding  the  uses  to  which  weeds  may  be 
put.  Secondly,  this  question  invariably  stuns 
its  hearers  into  a  reflective  silence  from  which, 
reluctantly,  it  may  be,  emerges  the  hesitating 
answer,  **No,  of  course  not."  The  answerers 
subside  into  a  sad  apathy,  which  affords  oppor- 


16        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

tunity  to  the  questioner  to  rise  in  his  place  and 
propound  his  ism  or  his  panacea  unhindered. 

Analysis  of  the  reason  why  hearers  are 
always  stunned  into  acquiescence  reveals  some- 
thing like  this:  The  question  automatically 
drives  out  of  mind  the  ideal  Anglicanism  which 
is  in  the  hearts  of  our  mother  Church's  loyal 
sons  and  daughters,  and  there  arises  in  the 
place  of  that  noble  mental  monument  a  pur- 
view of  Anglicanism  as  it  appears  when  seen 
piecemeal  in  its  harrowing  details.  Visions 
rise  before  the  mind's  eye  of  parish  rows,  duf- 
ferism  and  ineptitude,  ''parochialism,"  groups 
of  gossiping  old  women  of  both  sexes,  mean- 
ness, lay  popes,  struggling  parsons  with  strug- 
gling gentlewomen  for  wives  and  groups  of 
precariously  educated  and  nourished  children, 
«ung  mat  tins,  local  ministerial  associations,  and 
the  bitter  cry,  ''how  long,  0  Lord,  how  long!" 
All  these,  and  countless  similar  details  of 
Anglicanism  as  it  appears  on  the  surface  to  be, 
arise,  we  see,  before  the  mind's  eye  of  the 
hearer  of  the  question,  and  then,  inescapeably, 
the  reluctant  answer  rises  to  tired  minds  and 
comes  out  of  wearied  lips,  "No,  no,  of  course 
not  that."  The  ingrained  human  sense  of  the 
grotesque  comes  along  to  help  out  the  reluc- 
tant conclusion.  The  imagination  deals  frag- 
mentarily  with  things  like  Hottentots  or  bol- 
shevists  converted  to  something  like  the  sum 
of  the  details  which  have  passed  through  the 
mind.  One  imagines  Esquimaux  engaged  in  a 
cake  sale  to  buy  a  new  carpet  for  the  church. 
Latins  stand  up  in  Jerry-built  wooden  barns 
of  meeting  houses  while  a  group  of  caballeros 


CULTIVATING  THE  GARDEN         17 

and  seiioritas  render  Caleb  Simper's  Te  Deum 
in  E-flat  at  Morning  Prayer,  somewhere  in  Ar- 
gentina. The  mental  processes  reach  after  and 
attempt  to  visualize  a  large  group  of  Greek 
peasants  engaged  in  stultifying  themselves  at 
a  Pleasant  Sunday  Afternoon  conducted  by 
Captain  Papadopoulos  of  the  Peloponnesus 
Division  of  the  Church  Army.  The  imagina- 
tion fails,  breaks — ''No,  no,  a  thousand  times, 
no."  Of  course,  it  is  absurd  to  try  to  convert 
the  world  to  Anglicanism — abysmal,  funny! 

But,  approached  from  another  viewpoint, 
this  proposal  appears  less  and  less  absurd.  It 
begins  in  fact  to  grow  upon  one  when  one  puts 
the  question  like  this:  What  expression  of 
Christianity  is  better  than  Anglicanism  f  If 
we  believe  it  to  be  right  that  there  should  be 
one  fold,  as  there  is  one  Shepherd,  just  what 
fold  must  it  be,  or  is  there  to  be  a  new  Church? 
The  "new  church"  idea  is  impossible,  of 
course,  "that  way" — as  Nineteenth  Century 
Novelists  were  so  fond  of  saying — "that  way, 
madness  lies !"  If  there  is  to  be  one  fold,  quite 
clearly  it  will  have  to  be  a  fold,  however  ex- 
panded and  rebuilt,  which  is  already  on  its 
foundations,  and  the  task  of  determining 
which  fold  is  the  less  difficult  as  one  applies 
reason  and  common  sense  to  the  problem. 

It  is  clear  enough  that  there  are  not  so  very 
many  existing  folds  to  choose  from.  Sectarian- 
ism has  them  a-plenty,  of  course,  but  the  choos- 
ing of  any  one  of  these  and  holding  it  up,  as  a 
prospective  fold  for  the  world,  is  ipso  facto  a 
reductio  ad  ahsurdtim.  One  has  only  to  imagine 
the    world — it    is    a    large    order — Anglican, 


18        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

Roman,  ''Orthodox/'  Protestant,  and  non- 
Christian,  all  joining  the  Baptists  or  the  "Dis- 
ciples" or  the  "Wee  Frees"  to  get  a  kaleido- 
scope picture  so  madly  eccentric  as  to  paralyze 
the  faculties  of  reason. 

It  must  be  obvious  enough  that  no  one 
variety  of  Protestantism  is  adequate  for  a  uni- 
versal fold  for  mankind.  It  cannot  be  that  the 
Shepherd  desires  to  gather  all  His  sheep  into 
such  as  this.  There  remain  four  possible  folds : 
] .  The  Pan-Protestant  fold ;  2.  the  Roman  Cath- 
olic fold;  3.  The  "Orthodox"  fold;  4.  the  Ang- 
lican fold.  Among  these  the  pragmatist  in  the 
subject  of  Christian  Unity  must,  perforce, 
choose. 

Let  us  take  them  up  in  order  and  examine 
them,  as  pointedly  and  briefly  as  possible. 

1.  The  Pan-Protestant  plan  may  almost  be 
dismissed  off  hand,  because  there  is  no  such 
fold  in  existence.  It  is,  at  best,  a  chimera.  It 
is  the  name  of  a  hope,  and  a  hope  not  even 
necessarily  connected  with  world-folding.  At 
its  very  best  it  is  only  a  panacea  on  paper  with 
a  universe  of  discourse  confined  to  certain 
Christians  cut  off  from  historic  Christianity 
and  desiring  no  more  than  to  attain  a  workable 
uniformity  of  administration  among  themselves 
despite  internecine  differences,  which  have 
proved,  up  to  the  present,  insuperable.  We 
may  dismiss  that  first  possibility  from  any 
present  discussion. 

2.  Roman  Catholicism  has  very  much  to  com- 
mend it  at  first  sight.  It  has  great  numbers 
of  adherents ;  it  is  the  largest  of  the  Christian 
communions;   it  has   an   admirable   executive 


CULTIVATING  THE  GARDEN         19 

system ;  it  possesses  a  high  degree  of  efficiency 
among  its  administrators  from  highest  to  low- 
est; it  is  committed  to  an  intensely  definite 
system  of  theology  and  administration;  its  ad- 
herents are  well  taught  in  the  tenets  of  their 
faith  and  are,  in  general,  and  with  certain  not- 
able national  and  racial  exceptions,  entirely 
loyal  to  their  system.  On  the  other  hand,  in 
spite  of  all  these  enormous  advantages,  the 
Roman  Catholic  system  does  not  commend 
itself  to  Christians  of  other  varieties  of  the 
faith  because  of  certain  broad,  general  facts, 
which  are  as  follows : 

It  has  patently  added  certain  definite  doc- 
trines to  the  faith,  a  thing  unparalleled  else- 
where in  Christendom,  which  the  rest  of  Chris- 
tendom, in  the  nature  of  things,  cannot  accept. 
The  chief  of  these  additions  is  the  phenomenon 
known  as  the  Papal  Claims,  whereby  the  Bishop 
of  Rome  claims  to  be  the  Vicegerent  of  God  on 
earth,  both  with  respect  to  spiritual  and  tem- 
poral affairs,  and  to  be  infallible  when  pro- 
nouncing, officially,  on  questions  of  faith  or 
morals. 

The  Roman  Catholic  system,  viewed  as  a 
whole,  does  not  conform  to  the  test  of  Holy 
Scripture,  even  when  reverent  and  due  allow- 
ance is  sympathetically  made  for  the  normal 
development  which  Christ  promised  under  the 
guidance  of  the  Holy  Spirit  of  God.  Herein 
again  there  is  absolute  consensus  of  opinion 
among  the  spiritual  and  intellectual  leaders  as 
well  as  among  the  rank  and  file  of  the  rest  of 
Christendom. 

The  general  position  of  the  Roman  Catholic 


20        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

Church  is  one  which  history,  as  an  inevitable 
test,  shows  to  be  unwarranted  and  incorrect. 

3.  The  Eastern  Orthodox  Communion,  made 
up  of  many  Churches,  as  of  the  Greeks,  Rus- 
sians, and  other  nationalities,  while  it  has  pre- 
served the  faith  and  is  in  other  respects,  so  far 
as  can  be  judged  with  discretion  and  sympathy, 
otherwise  fit  to  be  the  one  fold,  possesses  cer- 
tain characteristics  which  preclude  other  Chris- 
tians from  finding  in  it  a  comforting  home.  It 
is  distinctly  oriental  in  its  general  purview. 
Its  services  are  enormously  elaborate  which 
makes  them  unnecessarily  difficult  for  the  life 
of  the  Western  Hemisphere  to  adapt  itself  to. 
It  is  rigid.  Its  liturgical  languages,  which 
vary,  are  all  such  as  to  be  understood  only  by 
the  respective  hierarchies.  An  Eastern  Ortho- 
dox cleric  passing  from  one  national  Church  to 
another  is  unable  to  celebrate  the  mysteries,  in 
many  cases,  because  the  language  outside  his 
own  Church  is  unknown  to  him.  Even  the  litur- 
gical Greek,  which  is  the  language  of  a  large 
section  of  Eastern  Orthodoxy,  is  a  tongue  not 
generally  understood  even  among  the  erudite 
outside  certain  portions  of  the  Orthodox  East. 

4.  The  Anglican  Communion  has  often,  and 
justly,  been  called  the  communion  which  prof- 
fers to  the  rest  of  Christendom  the  best  meet- 
ing place  for  reunion.  It  possesses  all  the 
characteristics  of  a  Catholic  Communion,  i.  e., 
a  scriptural  religion,  the  Catholic  Creeds,  a 
valid  ministry,  and  a  sound  liturgy.  It  pos- 
sesses also  a  certain  flexibility,  a  learned  clergy, 
a  laity  combining,  in  general,  broad-mindedness 
and  orthodoxy,  and  uniformly  imbued  with  that 


CULTIVATING  THE  GARDEN         21 

peculiar  quality  of  culture  which  is  called  pro- 
gressive and  "AVestern;"  which  is  making  its 
way  around  the  world  and  attracting  to  it,  as  the 
secular  philosophy  which  most  strongly  com- 
mends itself,  the  leaders  of  the  nations  of  the 
world.  It  is  committed  to  the  principle  of 
liturgical  expression  which  is  locally  under- 
stood; it  is  firm  in  the  faith  and  at  the  same 
time  adaptable  to  the  spiritual  needs  of  all  men 
whatever  their  distinctive  characteristics,  na- 
tionally, racially,  or  otherwise. 

Any  one  of  these  four  possible  folds  for  man- 
kind can  be  criticised  both  favorably  and  ad- 
versely from  an  internal  point  of  view  as  well 
as  by  an  outsider.  Even  a  list  of  the  subjects- 
matter  for  such  criticism  would  make  a  fair- 
sized  book.  It  would  be  idle  here  to  attempt 
even  a  summarization  of  such  points.  But 
while  Pan-Protestantism,  Roman  Catholicism, 
and  Eastern  Orthodoxy  have  each  one  or  more 
qualities  which  can  be  urged  against  them  as 
insuperable  difficulties  in  the  way  of  regarding 
any  one  of  them  as  the  fold  for  humanity;  the 
fourth,  Anglicanism,  is  not,  necessarily,  open 
to  that  criticism.  At  least  in  the  view  of  an 
Anglican,  it  may  be  held,  and  conscientiously, 
that  if  Anglicanism  could  be  brought  up  nearer 
to  its  own  ideal;  if  its  norm  could  be  even  a 
little  more  fully  realized  in  practice,  it  would 
inevitably,  as  a  valid  communion  of  the  Holy 
Catholic  Church,  emerge  more  and  more  clearly 
into  the  position  of  the  ideal  fold  for  the  scat- 
tered sheep  of  Christendom  as  well  as  for  the 
other  sheep  which  are  wholly  without  the  fold. 

Is  it  reasonable,  then,  seriously  to  propose 


22        THE  GAEDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

to  one's  fellow  Anglicans,  and  through  them  to 
the  rest  of  Christendom,  that  the  ''Basis  of 
Unity"  which  shall  be  contended  for  by  Ang- 
licans is  to  be  Anglicanism  itself? 

One  may  find  in  the  Eoman  Catholic  attitude, 
conspicuous  for  its  uncompromising  quality,  a 
precedent  for  answering  "Yes."  It  is  not  pro- 
posed that  the  answer, ' '  yes, ' '  be  based  on  any- 
thing like  the  same  ground  that  makes  the 
Roman  Catholic  adhere  so  rigorously  to  his 
own  proper  panacea — submission  to  the  See  of 
Rome.  We  have  no  alleged  Vicegerent  of  God 
in  Anglicanism ;  we  could  not,  if  we  would,  base 
our  contention  on  any  such  ground  as  the 
Roman  reason.  But  it  is  fair  to  point  out  here 
that  there  is  a  precedent  for  the  attitude  sug- 
gested, and  that  a  conspicuous  and  well-recog- 
nized one. 

Other  kinds  of  Christians,  when  they  submit 
as  individuals  to  the  Church  of  Rome,  do  so, 
necessarily,  because  they  are  willing  to  accept 
the  papal  claims  in  return  for  what  they  are 
accustomed  to  name  ''certainty  and  unity," 
forgetting  or  shutting  their  eyes  to,  or  not  being 
aware  of,  the  very  powerful  forces  within  the 
Roman  Church  which  make  for  uncertainty  and 
disunity  when  one  scratches  the  surface. 

But  those  many  who  come  into  the  Anglican 
Communion  do  so,  in  general,  because  they  want 
a  valid  Church  connection  which  will  include 
what  has  been  dear  to  them  in  one  or  another 
kind  of  Protestantism ;  or  else,  if  they  have  been 
Romans,  to  find  a  valid  Church  connection 
which   will    be    free    from   the    characteristic 


CULTIVATING  THE  GAEDEN         23 

Roman  evils,  such  as  need  not,  here,  for  any 
good  purpose,  be  even  enumerated. 

With  this  safeguard  to  our  thought  pro- 
pounded, we  may  go  on  to  examine  the  facts 
which  make  the  Roman  claim  to  the  allegiance 
of  the  rest  of  Christendom  so  attractive  to  many 
souls. 

First,  the  uniformity,  external  though  it  be, 
of  the  Roman  Church.  This  apparent  indica- 
tion of  internal  harmony,  of  singleness  and 
definiteness  of  purpose  makes  a  tremendous 
appeal  to  the  seeker  after  spiritual  rest  and 
peace. 

Second,  the  efficiency  of  a  regulated  system. 

Third,  the  definite  claim  to  be  right. 

Fourth,  the  real  uniformity  (even  though  it 
be  somewhat  cut  and  dried  and,  to  the  more 
truly  Catholic  mind  of  Anglicanism,  inclusive 
of  various  tenets  which  are  no  integral  part  of 
the  depositnm,  of  faith)  of  the  teaching. 

All  these  claims  of  the  Roman  Church  are 
sound,  psychologically,  and  as  such,  apart  from 
their  Roman  source,  are  worthy  of  examination 
by  any  other  communion  which  is  desirous  of 
making  a  strong  appeal  to  prospective  con- 
verts. The  fact  that  they  are  characteristic  of 
the  Roman  Church  has  in  it  nothing  to  invali- 
date them.  This  merely  indicates  that  the 
Roman  Church  (and  who  doubts  it?)  is  wise  in 
its  generation.  We  can  see,  if  we  put  prejudice 
aside,  how  excellent  a  thing  it  is  to  possess  uni- 
formity of  practice  and  teaching,  to  adhere  to 
a  well-regulated  and  efficient  system,  and  to  be- 
lieve in  our  system  so  strongly  as  to  be  will- 
ing to  put  forward  our  claim  in  a  positive  man- 


24        THE  GAEDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

ner;  and  we  can  see  this,  as  it  happens,  not 
only  by  the  processes  of  thought,  but  by  a  dem- 
onstration of  how  it  works,  when  used,  as  it  is 
by  the  Roman  Communion,  in  spite  of  what 
seem  to  others  the  glaring  inconsistencies  and 
obvious  errors  of  that  system. 

We  do  not,  as  a  communion  of  the  Holy 
Catholic  Church,  need  to  go  to  Rome  to  learn 
how  to  make  ourselves  externally  and  in  prac- 
tice what  we  are  ideally  and  in  theory,  and  par- 
tially in  fact ;  but  there  is  no  sound  reason  why 
we  should  ignore  these  various  means  to  the 
best  of  good  ends  merely  because  Rome  uses 
them  so  successfully.  And  when  we  say,  as  we 
often  do,  that  Rome  must  reform  herself  be- 
fore others  will  listen  to  her,  it  is  only  just  to 
apply  this  test  to  ourselves. 

In  order  to  make  anything  like  the  appeal  to 
the  ignorant  and  the  indifferent,  to  the  millions 
upon  millions  of  persons  who  are  unchurched  or 
untaught,  or  mistaught,  it  is  primarily  neces- 
sary that  Anglicanism  should  realize  its  nor- 
mal self -consciousness,  stop  fighting  internally, 
close  up  the  ranks,  and  agree  upon  its  work- 
ing principles;  and  then  express  these  in  its 
practice. 

To  bring  about  that  desideratum,  it  is  clearly 
essential  that  one  of  the  high  points  of  the  pro- 
cess is  to  develop  efficiency  among  the  leaders : 
the  clergy  and  the  church  workers,  and  the 
laity  who  are  in  a  position  to  exercise  influence 
in  the  countless  way  which  can  make  for  the 
extention  and  the  general  betterment  of  the 
Kingdom  of  God.  This  fact  is  the  justification 
for  any  attempt  at  internal  betterment,  and 


CULTIVATING  THE  GAEDEN         25 

what  is  involved  is  both  critical  and  construc- 
tive teaching  and  constant  warfare  against 
weeds. 

These  blemishes  in  the  Anglican  portion  of 
the  Lord's  Garden,  some  of  which  are  here  dis- 
cussed under  the  figure  of  weeds,  are  manifold 
and  various,  and  undoubted.  A  list  of  them 
would  be  formidable,  and  a  list  which  one  lover 
of  Anglicanism  might  make,  would  probably  be 
widely  different  from  a  list  made  by  another. 
It  is  a  task  whicli,  when  undertaken  by  any 
one  person,  can  be  accomplished  only  by  the 
use  of  his  own  judgment,  and  in  the  hope  of 
persuasion  and  of  securing  agreement.  The 
writer  attempts  herein  to  take  note  of  what 
appeal  to  his  judgment  as  peculiarly  noxious 
weeds,  and  to  deal  with  each  kind  as  best  he 
can,  in  the  same  hope  of  being  able  to  persuade 
and  of  securing  agreement  about  them ;  and  of 
suggesting,  as  kindly  and  pleasantly  as  he  may, 
the  remedies  indicated  by  his  own  judgment. 
Many  doubtless,  will  not  agree  with  that  judg- 
ment ;  some,  perhaps,  may  be  assisted. 

Such  a  list  would  include,  he  thinks,  what  to 
him  appear  to  be  outstanding  blemishes  in  the 
Anglican  portion  of  the  Garden,  and  a  chapter 
is  devoted  to  the  discussion  of  each.  These  are : 
1.  A  certain  smug  satisfaction  with  something 
vague  understood  as  the  Reformation  Settle- 
ment. 2.  Being  a  Jack  of  All  Trades  in  the 
Ministr3^  3.  The  widespread  substitution  of 
what  may  be  called  the  Sidewalk  Ministry  for 
the  Ministry  of  the  Sanctuary.  4.  The  still 
more  widespread  ignorance  among  lay  people 
of  the  reason  for  church  attendance.      5.  The 


26        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

unwillingness  to  recognize  the  mind  of  the 
Church  with  respect  to  clerical  marriage;  and 
eyes  being  closed  to  the  fact  that  this  vital  ques- 
tion is  primarily  economic  and  temperamental, 
rather  than  a  question  of  ' '  churchmanship. " 
6.  The  deplorable  ineptitude  in  the  matter  of  the 
art  of  public  worship  which  still  prevails  in  our 
communion.  7.  The  misunderstandings  related 
to  work  among  the  foreign-born,  and  especially 
the  prepossession  in  favour  of  basing  such 
work  chiefly  upon  what  is  called  Social  Service. 
8.  The  toleration  of  that  insidious  process 
called  ' '  M  odernism ' '  which  seeks  to  replace  the 
Christian  Religion  within  the  Church  with  an 
emulsion  of  panaceas.  9.  The  particular  ab- 
surdity^, prominent  in  such  "Modernism,"  of 
substituting  an  ideal,  called  Happiness,  for  the 
ideal  of  knowing  and  loving  God,  and  serving 
Him  because  He  is  known  and  loved.  10.  The 
literary  tendency,  with  its  reaction  upon  the 
popular  mind,  to  make  the  popular  conception 
of  Almighty  God  into  something  fundamentally 
heretical,  and  to  represent  the  clergy  as  being 
uniformly  afflicted  with  a  kind  of  softening  of 
the  brain.  11.  The  over-emphasis  upon  purely 
academic  subjects  in  the  Church's  seminaries, 
and  the  corresponding  neglect  of  practical 
training  in  the  routine  duties  of  the  parish 
clergyman.  12.  The  outstanding  peculiarities 
of  the  clerical  character  and  of  that  of  church 
workers  in  general,  which  might,  to  the  advan- 
tage of  all  concerned,  be  minimized  to  the  point 
of  negligibility. 

When  our  Lord  spoke  His  parable  of  the 
tares,  and  laid  down  the  principle  that  these 


CULTIVATING  THE  GAEDEN         27 

must  be  allowed  to  grow  with  the  good  grain 
until  such  time  as  the  Head  Gardener  should 
be  ready  to  separate  and  garner  His  wheat,  He 
was  not  dealing  with  wrong  conditions ;  He  was 
dealing  with  wrong  people.  This  teaching  of 
our  Lord's  is  often  urged  against  various  kinds 
of  criticism,  but  it  is  an  open  question  whether 
or  not  such  urgency  is  merely  a  pious  cloak 
for  inertia.  Our  Lord's  counsel  on  this  point 
deals  with  the  tendency  of  puritanism  to  de- 
stroy him  with  whom  the  puritan  finds  himself 
out  of  agreement,  rather  than  with  the  pro- 
priety of  correcting  manifest  abuse.  He  was 
outspoken  when  it  came  to  characterizing  the 
Pharisees,  and  vigorously  active  when,  in  the 
zeal  of  His  Father's  House,  He  drove  out  the 
money  changers  and  them  that  sold  cattle  and 
doves,  and  cleansed  the  Temple.  It  is  only  in 
a  spirit  of  profound  humility,  therefore,  that 
anyone  may  venture  to  set  forth  a  body  of 
criticism  which  shall  be  concerned  with  the 
members  of  His  Body,  even  in  the  light  of  His 
own  great  example,  and  of  the  precedents  He 
set  for  the  renewal  of  God's  planting. 


n 

A  Neglected  Source  of  Information 

If  anyone  desires  to  learn  anything,  there 
are,  in  a  broad,  general  way,  three  sources  open 
to  him:  the  past,  the  present,  and  the  future. 

For  example,  if  one  desires  to  know  all  there 
is  to  be  known  of  aviation,  it  must  be  taken  for 
granted  that  although  much  has  already  been 
accomplished  in  this  marvellous  field,  the  great 
work  of  the  fliers  lies  in  the  future.  Predic- 
tions are  especially  valuable  here.  The  aspir- 
ant in  aviation  must  ''look  into  the  future" — 
he  must  have  vision.  The  Wright  brothers  and 
the  others  who  have  succeeded  these  pioneers 
in  practical  flying  had  vision,  and  therefrom 
they  derived  much  of  their  inspiration  and 
even  something  of  their  technic.  For  a  convinc- 
ing exposition  of  this  seemingly  singular  point 
of  view,  anyone  who  might  be  at  first  inclined 
to  question  the  saneness  of  that  statement  may 
be  referred  to  chapter  one,  "Forecasting  the 
Future,"  in  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells'  "What  Is  Com- 
ing." 

If  engineering,  or  especially  manufacturing 
and  business  administration,  be  the  object  of 
serious  study,  the  present  is  the  great  time 
wherein  to  find  the  sources  for  such  study, 
because  these  things  appear  to-day  to  be  at 
their  crest  of  accomplishment. 

28 


NEGLECTED  INFORMATION         29 

But  there  are  many  things — most,  in  fact, 
considering  the  whole  subject  quantitatively — 
which  can  only  be  learned  by  looking  intelli- 
gently into  the  past.  The  great  matter  of 
Gothic  architecture  is  one  of  these;  staining 
glass,  a  concomitant  minor  art,  is  another.  If 
it  be  held  that  Anglicans  do  not  need  to  learn 
from  the  Church  of  Rome,  devotion  and  disci- 
pi  lue,  and  how  to  do  things  ecclesiastically,  it  is 
a  far  cry  from  holding  that  there  is  not  much 
to  be  learned  from  the  great  past  of  our  own 
communion. 

We  have  in  the  Anglican  Communion  a 
definite  life  and  a  definite  development,  such  as 
it  is;  very  strong  in  some  respects,  lamentably 
weak  in  others,  and  this  life  and  this  develop- 
ment both  have  their  roots  deep  in  the  past. 
It  is  not  enough  to  go  back  merely  to  the  period 
of  the  Reformation.  It  is  well  known  that  the 
processes  of  the  English  Reformation  did  not 
— the  berserker  personality  of  Martin  Luther 
being  fortunately  lacking — irremediably  dam- 
age the  ship  of  the  Church  when  its  barnacles 
were  forcibly  scraped  off.  Luther  removed  the 
barnacles  from  the  German  ship  effectually, 
and  he  ripped  away  many  a  good  plank  with 
them.  In  the  storm  and  stress  of  the  English 
Reformation,  however,  very  much  dropped  out 
of  sight  which  has  only  very  gradually  emerged 
since.  It  is  possible  that  a  brief  estimate  of 
that  which  was  bad,  defective,  and  inefficient  in 
the  pre-reformation  English  Churcli,  followed 
by  another  summary  of  what  was  good,  admir- 
able, and  effective  might  do  something  towards 
clearing  the  ground  for  those  of  us  who  desire 


30        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

to  play  our  parts  in  the  process  of  legitimate 
restoration  and  improvement.  It  is  impossible 
here  to  do  more  than  very  briefly  to  touch  upon 
these  associated  abuses  and  admirable  qualities 
of  the  mediaeval  Church  in  England;  but  with- 
out any  attempt  to  be  exhaustive,  enough  may 
be  included  in  such  summaries  to  demonstrate 
that  there  is  something  here  worth  understand- 
ing. 

Beginning,  then,  with  the  bad  side  of  things, 
we  take  up  and  examine  cursorily  certain  con- 
ditions in  mediaeval  Anglicanism  which  stand 
out  prominently;  and  then  proceed  to  enumer- 
ate certain  others,  pausing  only  to  note,  in  ad- 
vance, that  most  if  not  all  of  the  outstanding 
bad  conditions  have  been  effectively  reformed 
or  at  least  alleviated. 

1.  English  dioceses  in  the  Middle  Ages  were 
so  huge  that  the  bishops,  even  if  they  had  been 
so  disposed,  could  hardly  have  done  their  full 
duty.  But  the  bishops,  as  a  rule,  were  unwill- 
ing to  have  them  divided.  Most  of  the  higher 
clergy  were  occupied  at  least  in  part  with  sec- 
ular activities.  They  used  their  church  offices 
as  sources  of  revenue  and  so  far  as  their  per- 
sonal attention  was  concerned,  appear  to  have 
neglected  much  of  what  we,  looking  backward, 
see  might  have  been  done.  Many,  of  course, 
were  non-residents.  Even  ordinations  seem  to 
have  been  regarded  by  some  as  of  less  impor- 
tance than  secular  affairs  and  the  ever-present 
question  of  their  incomes.  Simony  and  plural- 
ism flourished  broadcast. 

2.  There  were  unquestionably  cases  of  abuse 
of  the  celibacv  which  was   the  rule  for  the 


NEGLECTED  INFORMATION         31 

clergy,  regular  and  secular  alike.  In  many  in- 
stances ignorant  men  were  ordained,  and  thou- 
sands never  advanced  beyond  the  minor  orders, 
which,  because  of  the  Privilege  of  Clergy,  at- 
tracted the  unfit,  the  worldly,  and  the  schemers. 

3.  Private  chapels  such  as  were  scattered 
over  the  land  in  great  numbers  especially  near 
the  end  of  the  Middle  Ages  were  chiefly  served 
by  clergy  so  little  trained  and  so  unspiritual 
that  even  to-day  the  term  "chantry  priest" 
connotes  something  bad,  defective,  and  ineffi- 
cient. 

4.  The  See  of  Rome  claimed  ecclesiastical 
jurisdiction  in  England,  and  for  a  period  in  the 
heart  of  the  Middle  Ages  it  held  England  also 
as  a  temporal  dependency.  Its  influence  on 
England  and  the  English  Church  was  very  bad 
in  many  respects.  The  papacy  seems  to  have 
exercised  little  fostering  care  over  the  English 
Church.  Nevertheless,  it  demanded  obedience. 
It  filled  a  large  proportion  of  English  Church 
offices  with  foreigners,  many  of  whom  drew 
their  revenues  while  performing  none  of  the 
duties  or  functions  of  the  offices.  It  exacted 
immense  sums  of  money  in  Aids,  Annates,  Fees 
for  Investitures,  and  various  legal  fees.  It 
caused  exasperating  delays  in  the  issuance  of 
judgments  and  wasted  the  time  and  the  re- 
sources of  litigants  in  painful  and  expensive 
journeys  to  and  from  Rome.  The  subtlety  and 
hypocrisy  of  its  decisions  were  not  in  general 
accord  with  the  robust  English  conception  of 
justice.  At  the  worst,  it  may  be  said  that  the 
papacy  was,  in  its  relations  with  England, 
grasping,  dishonest,  and  insatiable.     At  best, 


32        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

it  may  be  held  that  it  laid  too  much  stress 
upon  its  usurped  jurisdiction  in  temporal  mat- 
ters to  have  been  otherwise  than  unfit  to  serve 
as  a  proper  spiritual  head  for  the  Church  of 
England. 

5.  Monasticism  may  be  called  the  heart  of 
English  church  life  in  the  Middle  Ages.  And 
monasticism  possesses  a  very  definite  bad  side 
which  must  be  included  in  this  summary — a 
side  which  did  much  to  counterbalance  its  well- 
known  features  of  excellence.  As  early  as  the 
XII  century  a  great  number  of  monasteries  be- 
came imbued  with  the  type  of  secularity  de- 
rived from  and  peculiar  to  the  feudal  system 
under  which  the  great  orders  flourished.  Great 
religious  houses,  at  the  time  of  their  highest 
prosperity,  in  the  XIII  century,  controlled  as 
much  as  one-third  of  the  land  in  England, 
which,  in  many  instances,  was  administered 
selfishly  as  monastic  decay  began  to  set  in. 
The  essence  of  such  decay  is  found  in  the 
phenomenon  of  the  order  coming  to  regard 
itself  as  an  end  to  be  served,  rather  than  as  a 
very  important  means  of  serving  the  Church 
and  God's  people.  One  of  the  first  and  most 
obvious  results  is  to  be  seen  in  the  administra- 
tion of  the  real  property  held  by  the  order. 

It  must  also  be  admitted  that  a  greal  deal 
of  time  was  wasted  in  the  monastic  life,  which 
might  have  been  devoted  to  something  more 
spiritually  construcitve  than  the  overlong  and 
many-times-multiplied  services,  and  the  gross 
over-emphasis  upon  the  practices  of  asceticism 
in  which  much  of  the  energy  of  really  sincere 
and  devoted  men  was  dissipated. 


NEGLECTED  INFORMATION         33 

The  monasteries  got  into  their  control  a  great 
deal  of  the  revenue  which  should  have  been 
secured  to  the  parish  churches,  and  as  a  con- 
sequence the  secular  clergy  became  less  and  less 
adequately  supported,  and  great  numbers  of 
fjarishes  received  a  relatively  inadequate  sup- 
ply of  spiritual  ministrations. 

The  exemption  from  episcopal  visitation  and 
control  enjoyed  by  many  great  religious  houses 
— the  well-known  rights  of  religious  apart — 
became  in  England  a  fertile  source  of  evil.  For 
the  exempt  monasteries  were  naturally  in  close 
alliance  vriih.  the  papacy,  whence  the  privilege 
of  exemption  was  derived,  and  this  division  of 
allegiance  could  not  help  but  make  for  harm 
and  disunion. 

Rivalry  between  various  orders  and  houses 
was  not  lacking,  but  instead  of  this  rivalry 
taking  the  sound  form  of  vieing  with  each  other 
in  spirituality  and  good  works,  the  contests 
were  only  too  frequently  over  the  acquisition 
or  retention  of  wealth  or  distinction,  high  posi- 
tion, privilege,  and  power.  Thus  secularity  had 
many  opportunities  to  grow  apace  even  in  these 
strongholds  of  God,  and  public  confidence 
VN'aned  correspondingly. 

6.  The  decline  of  the  friars,  beginning  near 
the  end  of  the  XIII  century,  was  paralleled  by 
the  spiritual  decline  in  the  monasteries,  but  in 
all  probability  it  demoralized  the  people  to  a 
greater  extent  than  the  monastic  deterioration 
alone  could  have  accomplished,  because  the 
friars  had  gradually  grown  to  be  closer  to  the 
people  than  had  the  monks.  The  influence 
which  these  once  fervent  evangelists  and  re- 


54        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

formers  of  everyday  life  had  acquired  was  un- 
doubtedly very  powerful  among  the  common 
people.  Their  terrible  lapse  into  petty  pilfer- 
ers and  peddling  privilege-mongers  is,  without 
question,  closely  allied  with  the  contemporary 
decline  in  popular  piety.  The  salt  was  begin- 
ning to  lose  its  savour  and  it  was  not  long  be- 
fore it  was  to  be  cast  out  and  trampled  under- 
foot of  men. 

7.  Allied  with  the  curses  of  papal  domina- 
tion and  the  decadence  of  the  religious  life,  was 
the  curse  of  dirt.  Sanitation,  as  we  understand 
the  term  to-day,  was  undreamed  of  in  the  Mid- 
dle Ages  and  long  afterwards.  Cleanliness  was 
no  conspicuous  virtue,  and  dirt  covered  human- 
ity, layman  and  cleric  alike.  This  is  a  general 
condition,  of  course,  and  as  such  could  by  itself 
have  no  particular  bearing  upon  the  good  and 
bad  sides  of  Anglican  church  life.  Such  bear- 
ing lies  in  the  fact  that  vermin  and  muck  came 
to  be  regarded  as  adjuncts  of  asceticism.  Lords 
of  the  realm,  bishops,  priests,  and  scullions, 
court  ladies,  and  kitchen  knaves  reeked  with 
unwholesome  filth,  which  may  have  helped  to 
keep  out  the  cold,  but  which  at  the  same  time 
invited  the  pestilence.  It  is  true  that  the  Eng- 
lish Church  was  neither  better  nor  worse  than 
her  Continental  contemporaries  in  failing  to 
perceive  and  denounce  this  horror.  While  we 
may,  and  justly,  commend  as  wholesome  the 
philosophy  of  the  hair  shirt,  and  reverence  its 
godly  wearers  for  what  they  were  (and  are), 
we  can  hardly  fail  to  shudder  over  the  condi- 
tion of  the  great  and  good  Becket's  body  when 
with  loving  care  his  clergy  stripped  the  costly 


NEGLECTED  INFORMATION         35 

outer  fabrics  away  from  the  gaping  wounds, 
and,  finding  their  late  Lord  Archbishop  swarm- 
ing with  vermin  beneath,  praised  God  amain 
that  here  indeed  was  a  true  saint ! 

We  turn  joyfully  to  the  consideration  of  some 
of  the  outstanding  good  points  of  the  mediaeval 
English  Church. 

1.  The  Church  was  so  effectively  established 
as  the  religion  of  the  English  people  that  no- 
where in  the  land  could  a  spot  be  found  wherein 
its  beneficent  influence  was  not  active.  Among 
the  thousands  of  parishes  into  which  the  great 
dioceses  were  divided,  and  whose  glorious  ar- 
chitectural fabrics  are  the  inspiration  and  the 
despair  of  modern  church  builders,  there  were 
distributed  probably  as  many  as  twenty  thou- 
sand clergy.  These,  unhampered  by  many  of 
the  secondary  interests  which  absorb  so  much 
of  the  time  of  the  modern  clergy,  spent  their 
lives,  their  energies,  and  such  learning  as  they 
possessed  in  guiding  the  spiritual  lives  of  the 
people.  Undistracted  by  sectarian  rivalries, 
aided  by  the  vast  momentum  of  national  enthu- 
siasm for  the  Church,  supported  by  the  animat- 
ing spirit  of  a  ''Church  unity"  so  thorough- 
going as  to  have  elicited  no  descriptive  phrase, 
these  clergy,  many  of  them  trained  in  the  uni- 
versities, guided  their  flocks  from  the  cradle 
to  the  grave. 

2.  It  may  safely  be  averred  that  the  English 
clergy  were  more  virtuous  than  their  Conti- 
nental brethren.  Even  the  higher  clergy,  for 
all  their  preoccupation  with  secular  affairs  and 
their  political  activity,  were  not  only  very  good 
examples  of  political  honesty,  but  also,  on  the 


36        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

whole,  superior  in  piety  to  the  clergy  of  other 
lands,  who  had,  more  than  the  English  Church 
dignitaries,  tlie  disadvantage  of  earlier  and 
longer  exposure  to  continental  culture,  and 
closer  relations  with  the  papacy. 

3.  The  Church  conserved  and  fostered  learn- 
ing. To  a  preponderating  extent  the  education 
of  the  young  was  in  the  hands  of  the  clergy, 
and  here,  above  all  things  else  in  immediate 
practical  importance,  we  might  with  profit  look 
back  five  or  six  centuries  and  learn  something 
greatly  to  the  advantage  of  the  Christian 
Religion. 

4.  Side  by  side  with  its  educational  preoccu- 
pation and  intertwined  with  it,  was  the  practice 
of  the  fine  arts,  which  the  Church  of  England 
in  the  Middle  Ages  fostered  with  gracious  care. 
The  breach  between  the  Church  and  the  fine 
arts  to-day  is  perhaps  the  widest  of  the  clefts 
which  time  and  ineptitude  have  together  suc- 
ceeded in  making,  to  the  infinite  disadvantage 
of  both  the  Church  and  the  arts,  to  say  nothing 
of  the  artists.  The  average  Church  building 
to-day  is,  most  unhappily,  a  meretricious  monu- 
ment to  this  divorce,  while  in  many  quarters 
'  *  artist ' '  and  ' '  pagan ' '  are  terms  which  go  hand 
in  hand.  This  is  not  to  say  that  there  are  no 
godly  artists  or  no  artistic  Churches ;  but  both, 
most  unfortunately,  are  conspicuous  by  their 
singularity. 

5.  Until  their  decadence — which  was  a  rela- 
tively slow  process — had  made  great  inroads  in 
the  religious  life,  the  monasteries  offered  a 
peculiarly  effective  means  of  serving  God. 
Among  other  things  the  monasteries  were  re- 


NEGLECTED  INFORMATION         37 

sponsible  for  caring  for  innumerable  travelers 
and  sick  persons,  supplying  the  places  now  held 
by  the  hotels  and  the  hospitals.  The  religious 
life  needs  no  commending  phrases  to  demon- 
strate that  it  is,  in  itself,  the  finest  flower  of 
Christ's  religion.  The  monasteries  were  full 
of  faith  which  expressed  itself  in  a  multiplicity 
of  beautiful  lives  and  effective  good  works. 

6.  Widespread  individual  and  corporate 
piety  supplied  the  material  needs  of  the  Church, 
and  the  Church,  transmuting  these  gifts  by  her 
alchemy  into  spiritual  benefits,  gave  them  back 
with  a  generous  hand  to  the  people.  It  is  espe- 
cially notable,  for  example,  that  just  after  the 
Norman  Conquest,  when  the  last  of  the  long 
series  of  racial  amalgamations  was  taking  place 
in  England,  the  monasteries  formed  the  back- 
bone of  the  Church,  fortifying  the  religious 
character  of  the  English  people  so  that,  cen- 
turies later,  it  was  able  to  withstand  the  ter- 
rible stress  of  the  reformation  movement  which 
swept  Europe  like  a  tornado,  and  come  through 
that  violent  upheaval  nearly  unscathed.  The 
general  character  of  the  English  Church  and 
the  English  people,  which  may  be  described  as 
full-blooded,  rugged,  honest,  earnest,  and  inde- 
pendent, owes  an  incalculable  debt  to  the  re- 
ligious life  as  it  was  lived  in  the  monasteries 
of  the  XI,  XII,  and  XIII  centuries.  Clergy  and 
people  took  their  religion  seriously. 

7.  The  missionary  activity  of  the  friars — at 
its  height  in  the  early  part  of  the  XIII  century 
— besides  bringing  a  renewed  spirituality  to  the 
people  at  large,  must  also  be  regarded  in  the 
light  of  its  tremendous  power  for  stimulating 


38        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

the  secular  clergy.  The  parochial  clergy  were 
aroused  by  emulation  to  express  themselves  in 
a  great  amount  of  instruction  and  catechizing 
among  their  people.  A  lively  renewal  of  faith 
was  the  natural  outcome. 

8.  Among  the  characteristic  modes  of  medi- 
aeval expression  in  ecclesiastical  England,  it  is 
unnecessary  to  do  more  than  merely  state  that 
the  high  point  in  the  art  of  church  building  was 
reached  in  this  period.  The  very  best  that  the 
most  skilful  builders  can  accomplish  in  this 
field  to-day  is  to  imitate  the  churches  of  the 
Middle  Ages  more  or  less  successfully. 

It  is  difficult  to  imagine  a  parish  priest 
of  this  period  neglecting  some  of  his  routine 
duties  because  by  their  performance  he  might 
possibly  give  offense  to  some  of  his  parishion- 
ers !  It  was  an  age  of  faith,  of  faith  inevitably 
expressed  in  practice,  and  so  the  religion  of 
Christ  lived  in  the  hearts  and  showed  itself  in 
the  lives  of  men  and  women  and  children.  The 
age  had  its  glaring  faults,  but  while  we  depre- 
cate any  resumption  of  these,  or  acquiesce  in 
the  historic  rejection  of  them  which  the  refor- 
mation partially  accomplished,  we  should  be 
indeed  very  short-sighted  if  we  should  fail  to 
realize  how  much  we  might  learn  from  the  ex- 
ample and  practice  of  our  own  Church  at  a 
time  when  it  possessed  in  marked  degree  the 
very  sense  of  discipline  and  devotion  and  of 
"knowing  how,"  the  lack  of  which  is  its  chief 
weakness  to-day. 

If  it  be  kept  in  mind  that  here  is  the  source 
whence  we  may  derive  the  methods  for  much 
or  most  of  our  reconstructive  work,  there  need 


NEGLECTED  INFORMATION         39 

be  no  disposition  among  us  to  feel  that  we  are 
constrained  either  to  let  these  matters  go  by 
the  board,  or  to  learn  them  from  the  current 
practice  of  an  alien  and  hostile  communion. 

In  the  reformation  which  took  place  in  the 
affairs  of  our  own  communion,  the  activity  of 
the  reformers  took  the  wise  form  of  getting  rid 
of  real  abuses,  so  far  as  might  be,  and  retain- 
ing as  much  as  possible  of  what  they  believed 
to  be  good,  and  sound,  and  workable.  They 
made  an  infinitude  of  minor  mistakes  in  the 
light  of  the  present,  and  not  a  few  major  errors, 
but  they  did  not  fail,  as  the  various  Continental 
reformers  failed,  to  conserve  the  catholicity  of 
the  Church,  and  that  fact  is  enough  to  cover 
a  multitude  of  ineptitudes.  In  the  light  of  this 
universally  acknowledged  truth,  it  is,  perhaps, 
not  too  much  to  ask,  even  of  those  who  seem 
to  believe  that  all  later  development  was 
estopped  by  something  called  the  Reformation 
Settlement,  that  they  should  very  seriously  con- 
sider doing,  or  allowing  to  be  done,  the  restor- 
ative work  of  the  present  in  the  same  spirit 
which  actuated  the  historical  reformers  them- 
selves. This  is  a  very  simple  principle.  It  in- 
volves no  more  than  willingness  not  to  reject 
everything  in  the  life  and  spirit  of  Anglicanism 
which  flourished  before  the  day  of  the  second 
of  the  Tudor  kings  of  unwholesome  memory. 
There  is  higher  authority  than  Cranmer's  for 
the  precept  which  enjoins  us  who  have  Christ's 
Body  in  our  keeping  to  ' '  hold  fast  to  that  which 
is  good." 


Ill 

On  **  Efficiency  " 

All  clergy  are  professional  Christians,  liv- 
ing by  the  gospel.  And  all  professional  per- 
sons, doctors,  lawyers,  dentists,  pilots,  actors, 
have  to  consider  the  opinions  of  the  people  they 
serve.  Only  the  great  ones  of  earth  can  ordi- 
narily afford  to  ignore  public  opinion,  and  some 
even  of  these  have  fallen  grievously  because 
of  such  an  attitude. 

This  general  truth  has  laid  such  hold  upon 
the  clergy  that  many  of  them,  it  is  to  be  feared, 
forgetting  that  their  professional  status  differs 
fundamentally  from  all  others  because  it  is  a 
vocation,  and  failing  it  may  be  to  keep  con- 
stantly before  their  eyes  that  their  responsibil- 
ity is  to  God,  have  framed  their  lives  upon  the 
principle  that  the  people  must  be  pleased.  The 
result  is  what  has  often  been  called  the  ''good 
mixer,"  or  something  equally  banal  and  inept, 
in  far  too  many  cases. 

A  ''good  mixer,"  or  the  like,  is  very  apt  to 
be  incompetent  in  his  profession  because  he  is 
prone  to  rely  upon  what  he  likes  to  call  his 
personality !  There  ought  to  be  at  least  a  sense 
of  balance  in  this  matter.  When  anyone  is 
suffering  from  an  agonizing  toothache  what 
he  wants  is  a  skilful  dentist,  not  at  all  the  no- 
toriously pleasant  practitioner  whose  reputa- 

40 


ON  ''EFFICIENCY"  41 

tion  depends  almost  wholly  upon  the  slapping 
of  people 's  backs  in  a  hearty  manner  and  play- 
ing eighteen  holes  of  golf  with  neatness  and 
dispatch. 

A  pastor's  peculiar  work  is  done  with  souls 
for  materials,  and  what  he  is  for  is  to  bring 
men  and  women  and  children  to  know,  to  love, 
and  to  serve  God.  The  processes  involved  in 
this  work  are  not  simple.  Rather,  they  are  ex- 
traordinarily variable,  diverse,  and  complex. 
So  far  as  personality  is  concerned  in  this  kind 
of  work,  whatever  views  on  that  subject  may 
be  held  by  anyone,  it  may  still  be  taken  as 
axiomatic  that  however  well  versed  a  clergy- 
man may  be  in  the  duties  of  his  office,  an  ugly 
disposition  must  give  at  least  some  people  the 
idea  that  God  Himself  is  grim  and  dour  and 
difficult  of  approach.  When  a  clergyman  is  con- 
fronted with  the  tragedies  of  life,  the  great 
simple  things  like  birth  and  death,  and  the 
great  complicated  things  like  anguish  and  neur- 
asthenia, no  amount  of  attractive  playfulness, 
tact,  or  even  such  matters  as  successful  boy- 
scouting  mil  be  able  to  help  him  very  much  in 
dealing  with  them,  nor  will  they  be  of  any  par- 
ticular value  to  his  dying  or  sin-racked  par- 
ishioner. 

It  is  altogether  reasonable  for  a  professional 
Christian  to  cultivate  his  personality  and  to 
make  himself  as  well-informed,  agreeable,  and 
presentable  as  he  can.  But  if  he  is  to  accom- 
plish the  burdensome  task  which  has  been  laid 
upon  him — the  saving  of  immortal  souls — ^if  he 
is  to  persevere  under  the  ever-increasing  load 
which  bows  the  backs  and  thins  the  hair  of  true 


42        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

shepherds  of  God's  flock,  he  must  be  more, 
infinitely  more,  than  personally  delightful; 
more  even,  than  '* consecrated;"  more  than  an 
upright  citizen  who  can  look  any  man  in  the 
face.  He  must  be  professionally  skilful,  or  he 
is  very  likely  to  turn  out  a  failure,  an  unprofit- 
able servant. 

It  may  be  that  the  clergyman  or  the  candi- 
date for  Holy  Orders  is  a  kind  of  natural  pastor. 
One  meets,  occasionally,  such  a  man.  That  is  a 
legitimate  subject  for  congratulation.  God  and 
His  Church  need  many  just  such  persons,  fitted 
naturally  for  pastoral  work.  But  even  this 
kind  of  man  must  needs  learn  how.  And  this 
must  be  said,  plainly :  that  no  candidate  is  very 
likely  to  learn  very  much  of  the  technic  of  his 
pastoral  office  in  his  seminary.  Some  semi- 
naries ignore  nearly  everything,  in  the  purview 
of  the  pastoral  office,  except  ''scholarship." 
Others  try  to  accomplish  more,  but  it  is  rightly 
enough  felt  by  trustees  and  faculty  that  the 
young  men  preparing  academically  for  ordina- 
tion must  be  gr'ounded  in  the  prescribed  subjects 
in  the  all-too-scant  three  years  at  the  disposal 
of  the  faculty.  We  must  admit  that  most  men 
come  to  the  diaconate  with  the  academic  por- 
tions of  their  capabilities  well  enough  developed 
and  reasonably  disciplined,  but  with  only  very 
general  ideas  of  the  detailed  daily  work  of  their 
sacred  profession. 

An  appreciable  number  of  men  emerge  from 
seminaries  fairly  well  prepared  for  the  prac- 
tical work  of  the  priesthood,  and  most  of  what 
they  know  they  have  picked  up,  perhaps  before 
getting  as  far  as  the  seminary,  in  the  parish 


ON  "EFFICIENCY"  43 

wherein  they  derived  the  first  intimations  of  a 
vocation.  Eefuge  against  accusations  of  in- 
effective, practical  preparation  on  the  part  of 
the  seminary  is  commonly  taken  in  the  tacit 
understanding  that  the  deacon  will  pick  up  what 
he  may  need  to  know  during  the  curacy  which 
the  Canons  contemplate ;  and  often  he  does  so, 
but  too  often  he  has  to  depend  upon  himself, 
and  too  often  he  has  no  opportunities  of  the 
kind  save  to  serve  tables,  which  is  entirely 
scriptural  and  orthodox,  and  which  would  be 
entirely  effective  if  the  young  man  were  to 
continue  in  the  office  and  doing  the  work  of  a 
deacon  for  the  rest  of  his  life. 

Here  is  the  place,  it  would  appear,  to  say 
something  about  the  wooden  Anglican  policy 
of  keeping  a  man  from  Holy  Orders  until  he 
is  just  finishing  at  the  seminary,  and  then  send- 
ing him  out  as  a  deacon  to  do  parish  work  "for 
the  space  of  a  whole  year. ' '  If  such  an  one  were 
invariably  sent  into  a  parish  under  at  least  one 
trained  priest,  it  is  possible  that  in  the  course 
of  the  year  he  might  learn  the  fundamental 
duties  which  he  will  be  called  upon  to  perform 
for  the  remainder  of  his  ministry  as  a  priest. 
But  even  at  that,  the  system  is  needlessly  in- 
efficient. There  is  no  good  reason  at  all  why 
(as  in  the  case  of  most  dioceses  and  at  least 
in  accordance  with  the  policy  of  all  but  one 
American  seminary)  the  young  man  should  not 
come  out  of  the  seminary  a  priest  equipped  for 
the  work  of  a  priest.  So  far  as  anyone  can  see, 
the  only  practical  differences  between  a  deacon 
and  a  lay  reader  are  that  the  deacon  can  assist 
in  the  administration  of  the  Holy  Communion, 


44        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

perform  a  legal  marriage,  and  baptize  in  the 
absence  of  a  priest,  while  a  lay  reader  may  not. 
When  it  is  considered,  too,  that  deacons  coming 
out  of  the  seminary  are  more  often  than  not 
placed  in  charge  of  missions  or  even  parishes, 
— although,  of  course,  not  canonically  as  rec- 
tors, that  being  impossible — the  ineptitude  of 
this  plan  becomes  more  apparent.  One  might, 
save  for  the  prestige  of  having  a  person  who 
can  write  *' Reverend"  before  his  name,  almost 
as  well  have  a  lay  reader  in  charge  as  a  deacon. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  order  of  deacons 
might  well  have  a  place  in  the  work  of  the 
Church  which  no  one,  apparently,  thinks  of 
according  to  it.  There  are  any  number  of  men 
who  ought  to  be  deacons  because  they  are  doing 
the  characteristic  work  of  deacons,  to  say  noth- 
ing of  the  women  so  employed.  There  seems 
to  be  no  good  reason  why  positions  of  the  ad- 
ministrative and  secretarial  class  which  are 
commonly  filled  by  lay  people  of  both  sexes, 
should  not,  and  preferably,  be  filled  by  men  in 
deacons'  orders.  An  increase  in  the  number 
of  deacons  would  also  release  a  great  many 
priests  from  executive  positions  not  in  any  way 
requiring  priests  to  fill  them. 

Of  professional  ineptitude  it  would  be  very 
easy  to  give  a  catena  of  examples.  It  is  unneces- 
sary, however,  in  that  or  in  any  other  way  to 
emphasize  that  the  Anglican  Communion's 
weakest  point  is  her  discipline.  It  may  fairly 
be  asked  how  many  clergy  at  graduation  and 
first  ordination  have  as  clear  an  idea  of  their 
duties  as,  say,  a  newly  doctored  medico  step- 
ping into  his  first  hospital  appointment. 


ON  ''EFFICIENCY"  45 

One  gathers  that  there  are  very  few,  and  one 
reaches  this  conclusion  because  of  the  very 
scant  attention  paid  to  technic  by  the  clergy  as 
a  body.  There  is  perhaps  nothing  in  the  whole 
range  of  professional  skill  so  variable  as  the 
ability  to  do  their  work  among  Anglican  clergy- 
men. 

It  is  not,  of  course,  in  the  slightest  degree 
desirable  that  there  should  be  any  diminution 
in  the  seminary  emphasis  upon  Greek  and  He- 
brew, and  especially  Church  History,  and  the 
other  subjects  chiefly  taught.  Let  us  Anglicans 
conserve  at  any  reasonable  cost  of  effort  our 
hardly-earned  status  as  a  Church  with  a  learned 
clergy,  and  not  make  practical  efficiency  either  a 
shibboleth  or  an  alternative  to  sound  academic 
learning.  But  for  practical  purposes  pastoral 
theology  ought  to  have  much  greater  emphasis 
than  it  is  getting  in  our  schools.  This  should  be 
done,  and  the  other  not  left  undone.  Mere 
studiousness  is  not  enough  in  a  clergyman. 
Many  a  clergyman  is  a  monument  of  learning 
and  does  not  know  how  to  hear  a  confession. 
Many  a  clergyman's  parochial  work  might  be 
compared  justly  to  a  great  burst  of  accompani- 
ment with  hardly  any  song.  Many  a  one  knows, 
as  it  were,  all  that  is  known  of  dendrology  and 
silviculture  and  the  exact  points  of  differences 
between  these  two  branches  of  forestal  science, 
as  well  as  all  that  is  to  be  known  of  the  history 
of  implement-making  from  the  Assyrian  period 
down  through  history  to  the  present  day, — and 
could  not  drive  a  nail  into  a  plank  with  a  ham- 
mer to  save  his  life  and  the  roof  over  his  head. 
This    academic    dufferism    is    positively    en- 


46        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

trenched  in  some  parts  of  the  Church,  and  espe- 
cially in  England  among  the  country  clergy 
with  benefices  and  hobbies.  It  is  not  fair  to 
God,  and  it  bears  very  hard  on  God's  people. 
Not  the  least  damaging  effect  of  this  sort  of 
thing  is  that  the  people  become  habituated  to  it, 
expect  no  more,  even  admire  their  pastor  for 
his  great  learning,  and  so,  spiritually,  fall  into 
a  kind  of  creeping  paralysis. 

The  writer  had  several  years  of  intimate  con- 
tact, some  time  ago,  with  a  very  able  young 
priest  who  had  come  into  the  Anglican  from  the 
Roman  Communion  and  whose  exact  knowledge 
of  certain  workings  of  both  communions  was 
illuminating,  and  not  infrequently  amusingly 
pointed  in  its  expression.  He  was  accustomed 
to  sum  up  one  of  his  dissertations  with  some- 
thing like  this:  ''The  Romans  have  got  to 
learn  from  us  how  to  make  their  people  use  their 
heads,  and  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  history. 
But — I  get  rather  wild  when  I  think — what  a 
lot  we've  got  to  learn  from  them  about  disci- 
pline and  devotion  and  how  to  do  things ! ' ' 

One  can  understand,  and  to  some  extent  sym- 
pathize with,  this  viewpoint.  It  is  very  often 
maddening  to  contemplate  the  helplessness  of 
the  average  group  of  clergy  discussing  some 
problem  and  how  to  get  it  done ;  bewailing  the 
lethargy  of  their  congregations;  or  disputing 
learnedly  enough  about  this  or  that.  One  can, 
in  particular,  feel  pleased  at  the  first  part  of 
the  statement.  It  is  true  that  the  Romans 
might  find  it  hard  to  procure  a  better  school- 
master than  the  Anglican  consciousness  when 
it  came  to  learning  how  to  use  their  heads  and 


ON  ''EFFICIENCY"  47 

that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  history.  In  con- 
troversy, the  Anglican  prevails  over  the  Roman 
with  a  regularity  and  effectiveness  which  is 
almost  monotonous,  because  the  Anglican  knows 
how  to  use  his  head  and  is  familiar  with  his- 
tory. But  it  may  be  a  source  of  comfort,  when 
we  realize  how  far  behind  Rome  we  are  in  the 
results  of  our  efforts  towards  building  up  dis- 
cipline and  devotion  and  practicality,  to  remem- 
ber that  there  is  an  Anglican  norm,  however  in 
any  given  place  it  may  appear  to  have  become 
obscured.  We  do  not  need  to  learn  these  things 
from  Rome,  although  it  may  be  wholesome  for 
us  to  look  over  at  Rome  and  see  how  efficient 
she  is.  For  history  is  pretty  definitely  fixed 
and  settled,  and  no  one  has  ever  attempted  to 
lower  the  standard  of  Anglican  learning;  but 
the  ideal  discipline,  devotion,  and  pastoral  effi- 
ciency of  Anglicanism  is  a  very  different  ideal 
from  the  Roman  ideal. 

We  have,  for  example,  very  definitely  aban- 
doned or  repudiated  such  working  tools  as  in- 
dulgences, and  enforced  penances,  and  an  infal- 
lible pope.  All  of  these  are  excellent  tools,  if 
one  can  use  them,  but  Anglicans  cannot  use 
them,  for  they  are  plying  a  different  though  re- 
lated trade.  Roman  Catholic  Church  law  is 
tremendously  efficient  law,  but  ours  is  different. 
Ours  is  not  derived  from  forged  decretals  or  a 
spurious  ' '  donation. ' '  Our  working  system  ap- 
pears to  be  a  somewhat  milder,  more  reason- 
able, honester,  more  scriptural,  and  less  drastic 
system.  And  the  best  thing  about  it  is  that  it 
is  entirely  effective,  when  anyone  takes  the 
trouble  to  find  out  about  it  and  use  it.     The 


48        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LOED 

seminary  is  the  natural  place  to  learn  about 
it,  of  course. 

It  would  be  hard  to  find  a  better  application 
■of  the  rule  ''by  their  fruits  ye  shall  know 
them,"  than  the  efficiency  of  what  is  generally 
known  as  the  Anglican  "advanced"  Catholic 
Parish.  Without  saying  a  word  about ' '  Church- 
manship"  in  this  connection,  one  may  freely 
refer  to  the  "Advanced"  Parish  simply  because 
it  works  so  well.  The  secret  of  that  obvious 
efficiency — shown  in  regular  attendance,  spiri- 
tual lives  well  led,  material  results  accomplished 
out  of  all  relation  to  the  proportion  of  wealth 
commonly  found  in  such  parishes  when  com- 
pared with  the  richer  places  wherein  other 
types  of  Churchmanship  prevail — is  definite, 
painstaking,  skilful,  intelligent,  informed,  par- 
ish work  on  the  part  of  the  clergy.  The  one 
intelligent  accusation  ever  brought  against  such 
pastoral  work  is  that  it  is  "mechanical."  But 
in  fact  it  only  resembles  that.  Nothing  that  is 
alive — like  an  "Advanced"  Parish — is  merely 
mechanical. 

Like  other  similar  movements  the  current 
trend  of  thought  towards  efficiency  has  gathered 
about  it  much  that  is  crude  and  even  laughable. 
Efficiency  is  too  often  overdone  and  grotesquely 
overdone.  Humorous  tales  have  even  appeared 
in  magazines  with  "efficiency"  as  their  motif. 
"Efficiency  Edgar"  may  pass  into  the  language 
as  a  synonym  for  a  certain  type  of  enthusiast 
who  was  very  amusing  to  those  who  read  about 
him  in  the  late  current  publications.  But  leav- 
ing out  of  account  this  modern  over-emphasis 
which  threatens  to  grow  into  a  cult,  the  fact 


ON  ''EFFICIENCY''  49 

remains  that  the  word's  opposite  "inefficiency," 
is  to  be  always  condemned  and  surmounted  by 
workers  who  desire  to  accomplish  anything 
worth  while.  If  "efficiency"  is  overdone  in  the 
fields  of  business  administration  and  scientific 
pedagogy,  there  is  no  good  reason  to  acquiesce 
in  its  neglect  by  the  Church  of  God.  It  need 
not  be  underdone.  One  may  even  take  "Effi- 
ciency Edgar"  in  all  his  crudity  and  ludicrous- 
ness,  and  hold  him  up  as  an  example,  with  these 
words  in  his  mouth:  "Let  them  make  fun  of 
me  as  much  as  they  want  to.  I'm  the  one  who 
gets  the  laughs  when  the  pay  envelope  comes 
'round!"  This  is  the  gist  of  "Edgar's"  justi- 
fication for  his  practice  of  the  cult.  And  this, 
curiously  enough,  will  bear  a  certain  comparison 
with  another  speech  made  nearly  twenty  cen- 
turies ago  and  recorded  of  a  certain  employed 
man  w^ho  had  not  been  timid  about  using  his 
brains  and  managing  with  all  his  skill  a  certain 
trust  reposed  in  his  efficient  hands.  The  words 
of  this  speech  are:  "Well  done,  thou  good 
and  faithful  servant." 


IV 

Knowing  One's  Sheep 

The  writer  once  knew  a  clerg\^man,  rector  of 
a  New  England  parish,  who  went  about  without 
a  hat  because,  said  he,  the  Founder  of  Chris- 
tianity went  about  with  no  covering  for  His 
head.  It  is  quite  clear  that  this  is  an  absurd 
thing  to  do  without  any  analysis  or  assigning 
of  reasons ;  but,  upon  analysis,  several  reasons 
do  stand  out  as  grounds  for  the  patent  absurd- 
ity. 

Thus:  the  act  was  an  imitatio  Christi  based 
upon  a  purely  external  and  unimportant  cir- 
cumstance, and  even  on  this  low  plane  it  was 
an  inadequate  imitation.  It  did  not  go  far 
enough.  The  imitator  should  have  copied  the 
various  articles  of  dress  in  question  and  worn 
them.  A  better  imitation  would  have  been  to 
wear  the  ordinary  garments  of  one's  day  and 
generation,  precisely  as  the  Lord  did.  Any 
imitation  should  concern  itself  with  things  of 
more  importance  than  wearing  apparel.  Going 
about  without  a  hat  is  silly  in  the  winter  climate 
of  New  England. 

*'And  so  ad  infinitum.^' 

The  fact,  however,  that  absurdities  can  be, 
and  are,  based  upon  this  and  kindred  pious 
motives,  should  not  of  course  be  taken  as  pre- 
cluding a  legitimate  imitatio  Christi.     Clearly 

50 


KNOWING  ONE'S  SHEEP  51 

enough  His  example  should,  in  every  such  case, 
be  carefully  noted.  Anyone,  one  would  imagine, 
would  concede  that  much. 

Very  well!  It  is  a  fact  that  there  is  no 
recorded  instance  of  His  entering  a  dwelling — 
the  divine  prototype  of  the  modern  pastoral  call 
— except  when  he  was  invited,  or  sent  for,  or 
when  He  was  seeking  entertainment.  As  in  the 
conspicuous  case  of  Zacchaeus,  He  did,  from 
time  to  time,  seek  out  entertainment  for  Him- 
self and  His  followers,  and  His  great  works 
were  often  incidental  to  the  opportunities  so 
afforded;  witness  the  conversion  of  the  Chief 
Publican  of  Jericho  with  all  his  house. 

Although  no  one,  surely,  would  care  to  press 
this  analogy  too  far,  this  precedent  is  not  with- 
out its  value.  It  would  be  as  absurd  as  the 
incident  of  the  hat  to  allege,  for  example,  that 
because  Christ  did  not  write — except  once  in 
the  sand  at  His  feet — Christ 's  ministers  should 
not  write.  That  interpretation  would  cut  both 
ways.  I  would,  on  the  one  hand,  have  pre- 
vented this  book  from  appearing,  and  Cyrus 
Townsend  Brady  and  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson 
would  have  been  constrained,  for  self-expres- 
sion, to  the  limitations  of  the  pulpit  and  the 
lecture  platform.  And  there  would  be  no  Gul- 
liver, and,  alack!  no  Ralph  Connor.  On  the 
other  hand,  various  bookshelves  would  have 
been  free  for  all  time  from  Collections  of 
Sermons,  the  Institutes  of  Calvin,  and  the  col- 
lected Works  of  the  late  E.  P.  Roe. 

It  is  reasonable,  and  true,  to  say  that  Christ 
did  not  exercise  His  ministry  by  means  of  the 
written  word,  and  that,  by  this  analogy,  we 


52        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

should  not  be  justified  in  making  the  production 
of  letters,  books,  articles,  pamphlets,  and  other 
literary  productions  a  panacea  in  the  exercise 
of  the  ministry  to-day. 

Christ's  ministry,  whatever  social  conse- 
quences may  justly  be  adduced  from  it,  was 
wholly  personal  and  intimate,  and  yet  the  fact 
remains,  the  significant  fact,  that  He  did  not 
make  what  could  be  compared  with  the  modern 
parish  call.  It  is  contended,  therefore,  that  so 
far  as  the  light  of  this  consideration  leads  us, 
we  ought  to  be  able  to  see  that  the  parish  call 
is  a  secondary  and  subordinate  means  of  recon- 
ciling the  people  to  God. 

With  peculiar  force  the  axiom,  "These  things 
ye  should  have  done  and  not  left  the  other  un- 
done," applies  to  the  proper  relationship  be- 
tween a  minister's  calling,  and  the  performance 
of  his  other  necessary  pastoral  duties,  some  of 
them  fundamental. 

And  it  ought  to  be  unmistakable  that  in  ap- 
plying the  axiom  the  terms  must  not  get  them- 
selves reversed.  With  many  clergymen,  calling 
is  a  panacea,  an  obsession.  They  seem  to  apply 
the  axiom  thus:  "Call  anyhow,  and  get  the 
other  things  done  if  you  can  squeeze  them  in!" 
That  appears  to  be  very  different  from  Christ's 
methods  of  "reaching  people."  It  does  not 
seem  to  be  the  reasonable  nor  the  efficient 
method,  and  probably  it  can  be  shown  how  it 
fails  to  get  the  results  desired  by  the  good 
pastor  either  in  terms  of  spiritual  or  material 
values ;  because  it  is  a  clear  case  of  putting  the 
cart  to  pull  the  horse. 

It  must  be  admitted  that  this  question  of 


KNOWING  ONE'S  SHEEP  53 

pastoral  calling  is  one  of  the  vexed  questions — 
not  only  in  the  art  of  Pastoral  Theology,  but  in 
the  minds  of  practically  everybody  who  belongs 
to  a  church — and  there  are  still  a  good  many 
left  in  these  days.  There  may  be  said  to  be  two 
camps,  sharply  divided  over  this  question.  Ex- 
tremists on  the  one  hand  hold  that  the  parish 
clergyman  has  too  much  otherwise  to  do,  to 
permit  of  his  calling  on  his  people  at  all  except 
when  sent  for  or  invited.  The  other  side  con- 
tends that  ''pulling  doorbells"  will,  in  time, 
cure  all  the  ills  to  which  flesh  is  heir. 

There  are  five  possible  kinds  of  calls :  1 .  The 
sick  call.  2.  The  "functional"  call.  3.  The 
social  call.  4.  The  ''round  of  calls"  call.  5. 
The  "doorbell "call. 

1.  The  sick  call  requires  no  discussion  in  this 
place,  because  it  is  one  of  the  central,  funda- 
mental duties  of  the  pastor.  Such  visits  must 
and  should  be  made  whatever  else  may  or  may 
not  be  done. 

2.  By  the  "functional"  call  is  meant  every 
kind  of  visit  for  which  there  is  ' '  efficient  cause, ' ' 
i.  e.,  reasonable  necessity,  and  a  definite  object 
in  communicating  with  a  parishioner.  Par- 
ochial efficiency  may  frequently  be  greatly  en- 
hanced by  deputizing  this  kind  of  call,  or  by 
substituting  for  if  one  of  the  various  time- 
saving  devices  at  the  disposal  of  modern  peo- 
ple, such  as  the  use  of  the  telephone.  For  in 
many  cases  the  "function"  is  discharged  quite 
as  well  or  even  better  by  mere  communication, 
or  by  someone  other  than  the  clergyman.  The 
continued,  unexplained  absence  of  a  child  from 
the  Church  School  is  a  proper  occasion  for  a 


54        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

call  of  this  kind.  The  clergyman  thus  desires 
to  know  why  the  child  is  absent.  The  teacher 
of  the  child's  class  will  ordinarily  fulfill  this 
function  to  perfection,  and,  if  the  occasion  of 
the  absence  is  such  as  to  require  the  clergy- 
man's presence  ( although  he  would  probably 
have  been  sent  for  in  most  cases,  as  in  illness) 
the  teacher's  report  to  that  effect  will  make  it 
possible  for  him  to  save  time  and  energy  by 
making  his  call  prepared  to  minister  such  con- 
solation as  is  indicated.  An  objector  might  say 
at  this  point:  "Yes,  all  very  well!  But  can 
the  average  minister  manage  to  train  his 
Churcli  School  teachers  to  be  efficient  like 
thati"  The  answer  is,  "He  cannot,  if  he  spends 
all  his  time  rushing  about  the  streets  himself! " 

3.  The  social  call  is  not,  except  very  inci- 
dentally, a  pastoral  visit.  It  may  be  any  kind 
lOf  a  call,  and  discussion  of  it  does  not  belong 
here,  except  enough  summarily  to  dismiss  it 
from  consideration  in  this  connection. 

4.  The  "round  of  calls"  on  the  whole  group 
of  parishioners,  made  periodically,  is  happily 
obsolescent.  Its  basis  in  reason,  so  far  as  it 
ever  had  one  outside  the  works  of  George  Her- 
bert of  fragrant  memory,  is  on  the  supposition 
that  the  pastor  must  in  this  way  keep  in  touch 
with  his  parishioners.  But  the  custom,  where 
it  survives,  has  degenerated  into  the  merest 
concession  to  prejudice,  which  has  as  its  basis 
the  idea  that  if  one  person  is  visited  the  others 
will  probably  be  upset,  and  won't  come  to 
church!  In  any  event,  its  use  implies  a  parish 
wherein  the  people  do  not  come  to  church  or 
otherwise  take  their  parts  in  the  parish  life ;  a 


KNOWING  ONE'S  SHEEP  55 

group  of  people  who  have  to  be  "jollied  along" 
or  they  won't  play.  This  custom  is  and  always 
has  been  an  abysmal  bore  both  to  pastor  and 
people,  an  occasion  for  heartburnings,  and 
even,  by  a  strange  surviving  simian  twist  of 
the  corporate  parochial  mind,  a  test  of  the  ex- 
cellence of  the  pastor.  The  "round  of  calls" 
long  ago  fell  out  of  relationship  with  any  basis 
worthy  the  consideration  it  may  once  have  had 
in  reason.  Those  who  continue  to  make  it  are 
holding  on  to  a  moribund  tradition  without 
theological  groundwork  or  any  sound  ecclesias- 
tical custom  to  back  it  up ;  much  less  any  basis 
which  should  appeal  in  the  slightest  degree  to 
modern  people.  Even  in  the  case  of  a  parish 
canvass,  for  financial  or  other  reasons,  which 
might  he  thought  of  as  transforming  the 
"round"  into  a  "functional"  matter,  it  falls 
to  the  ground,  because  such  canvasses  are,  in 
accordance  with  the  best  modern  usage,  nowa- 
days always  made  by  committees  of  laymen  or 
laywomen. 

In  a  sizable  parish  the  "round"  means  hard, 
unnecessary  work  for  the  clergy,  probably 
serves  no  good  purpose  whatever,  and  serves 
to  keep  alive  and  crystallize  a  thoroughly  un- 
sound tradition  in  the  minds  of  the  people. 

5.  The  "doorbell"  call  is  English  rather  than 
American,  and  bound  up  with  "The  Establish- 
ment." There  is,  however,  a  certain  amount  of 
the  home-grown  article  in  these  United  States. 
In  its  perfection  it  belongs  to  an  Established 
Church,  wherein  the  clergy  are  regarded  as 
state  officials  with  certain  "rights  of  visita- 
tion."   Its  process,  in  the  pure  state,  appears 


56        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

to  be  for  the  visitor  to  take  his  ''district" 
street  by  street,  and  call  at  every  house  irre- 
spective of  the  ecclesiastical  status  of  the 
families  thus  visited.  It  is  hard  to  see  why 
anyone  should  even  think  of  making  this  kind 
of  call  in  the  United  States,  where  the  Church, 
D.  g.,  is  not  Established,  and  where  the  pas- 
tor is  not  regarded  as  an  official  of  the  state. 

With  that  classification  out  of  the  way,  it 
appears  chiefly  desirable  to  comment  on  the 
point  of  view  of  tlie  obsessed  caller. 

It  ought  to  be. sufficiently  obvious  that  the 
duties  of  a  parish  clergyman  who  wishes  to 
attend  to  work  for  which  he  is  paid  (he  knows 
what  he  is  going  to  get,  pretty  well,  before  he 
enters  the  ministry,  so  that  point  need  not  be 
stressed)  are  such  as  to  occupy  most  of  his 
available  time.  Any  such  parish  clergyman  is 
constrained  to  choose  between  doing  all  his 
specified  duties  with  some  degree  of  adequacy, 
and  substituting  for  such  a  normal  course  of 
procedure  a  policy  of  general  calling.  He  can- 
not do  both;  not  with  only  twenty-four  hours 
in  the  day,  and  the  absolute  necessity  of  sleep- 
ing and  eating  once  in  a  while. 

There  is  a  kind  of  man  in  the  ministry  whose 
disposition  is  such  that  if  he  were  not  a  clergy- 
man, he  would  consider  no  employment  except 
an  "outside  job."  Salesmen,  gas-meter  in- 
spectors, postmen,  policemen,  men  on  ice 
wagons — these  work  at  "outside  jobs,"  quite 
distinct  in  jjeure  from  the  vocations  which 
keep  a  man  within  doors  during  business 
hours,  such  as  the  work  of  clerks  and  shop- 
hands,  bankers,  dentists,  and  druggists. 


KNOWING  ONE'S  SHEEP  57 

Such  an  one  in  the  ministry,  one  shrewdly 
suspects,  is  simply  following  his  predilection 
when  he  insists  upon  basing  his  pastorate  on 
calls.  It  is  psychological,  like  so  much  else! 
He  is  insisting  on  an  "'outside  job"  for  him- 
self. Like  the  person  in  secular  life  who 
would  rather  drive  an  automobile  truck  than 
be  a  bank  clerk,  he  simply  will  not  work  in- 
doors, and,  being  in  the  trusted  class  of  pro- 
fessions, he  indulges  himself.  He  evades  that 
major  portion  of  his  proper  work  which  lies 
indoors  because,  temperamentally,  he  does  not 
enjoy  it.  He  persuades  himself  that  he  makes 
up  for  this  self-indulgence  by  pounding  the 
streets  and  by  going  up  and  down  steps. 

It  is  not  hard  for  him  to  lapse  into  a  settled 
philosophy  over  this  matter.  The  obsessed 
caller — because  it  is  human,  and  a  most  in- 
sidious tendency  at  that,  to  justify  oneself — 
makes  a  virtue  of  a  desirability.  He  has  a 
great  deal  to  say  about  what  he  calls  "dili- 
gent, painstaking,  consecrated  parish  visit- 
ing." As  he  approaches  middle  age  he  begins 
to  think  of  himself,  it  may  be,  and  of  his  peri- 
patetic activities,  as  rather  praiseworthy  on 
the  whole,  and  he  deprecates  those  who  do  not 
see  eye  to  eye  with  him.  He  also,  and  quite 
naturally,  flocks  with  his  own  kind,  much  like 
a  beekeeper  or  a  certain  kind  of  golfer ! 

Think,  too,  of  what  the  caller  par  excellence 
misses,  and  of  what  his  congregation  is  de- 
prived because  of  this  self-indulgence  of  his. 

A  pastor  should,  if  he  is  to  present  God's 
messages  through  the  medium  of  himself, 
study.    He  ought  really  to  study  a  great  deal. 


58        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

and  to  read  as  largely  and  as  broadly  as  pos- 
sible. He  should — he  is  more  or  less  obliged 
to — prepare  somehow  a  good  many  addresses 
and  sermons.  He  ought,  of  course,  to  do  this 
particular  work  painstakingly;  and  that  means 
the  devotion  of  much  time  to  ii.  He  must  plan 
a  great  many  things  for  other  people,  many  of 
them  important  as  affecting  other  people's 
lives — people  who  look  to  him  as  their  guide. 
It  is  a  responsibility !  He  must  inaugurate  in- 
immerable  activities,  supervise  them,  and  fre- 
quently take  an  active  part  in  their  perform- 
ance. He  must  write  many  letters ;  think,  occa- 
sionally at  least;  sleep  a  reasonable  number  of 
hours ;  eat  his  meals  with  a  certain  regularity, 
for  his  health  is  worth  something  at  least;  he 
must  attend  meetings  within  and  without  his 
parish;  he  must  see  people  who  make  appoint- 
ments to  call  upon  him:  he  must  make  his 
"functional"  and  certainly  his  sick  calls;  he 
must  keep  his  parish  books  as  a  rule ;  he  must 
officiate  at  a  good  many  services,  both  stated 
and  occasional ;  he  very  often  is  obliged  to  plan 
the  affairs  of  his  church  school,  and  at  least 
keep  an  eye  upon  it;  if  he  have  a  family  he 
must  give  at  least  some  time  to  it  and  to  its 
affairs ;  he  will  probably  belong  to  at  least  one 
or  two  clerical  associations,  or  organizations 
of  secular  character;  one  hopes  that  once  or 
twice  a  year  he  will  make  some  kind  of  "re- 
treat" for  the  good  of  his  own  soul  and  its 
refreshment;  he  must  go  about  more  or  less 
to  preach  or  take  part  in  conferences ;  every  so 
often  he  ought,  for  all  sakes,  to  get  quite  away 
from  people  for  a  vacation. 


KNOWING  ONE'S  SHEEP  59 

But  in  addition  to  these  practically  fixed 
duties,  for  they  all  fall  into  the  strait  category 
of  duty,  he  must,  if  he  be  in  any  wise  a  notable 
person  apart  from  his  parish  status,  contribute 
of  his  time  and  effort  to  the  general  good  out- 
side his  parish  in  one  or  more  fields  of  expres- 
sion; and  if  he  is  not  naturally  a  very  foolish 
and  unteachable  person,  he  ought  to  make  time, 
if  necessary,  for  a  modicum  of  wholesome 
amusement  and  relaxation  in  addition  to  his 
free  time  on  vacation. 

Therefore!  If  he  spends  the  bulk  of  his 
time  walking  the  streets  of  his  pastoral  cure 
because  he  likes  an  "outside  job,"  he  will  either 
be  obliged  to  neglect  all  these  necessary  things 
or  to  choose  among  them,  leaving  out  some ;  or 
else  make  a  heated  effort  to  keep  all  or  certain 
of  them  up  in  a  scrappy,  inadequate  fashion. 
Such  a  process,  either  alternative,  would  prob- 
ably be  w^orse  than  if  he  frankly  abandoned 
them  all  in  favour  of  what  he  will  call  senten- 
tiously,  "knowing  his  sheep."  That  is  his  fav- 
orite phrase.  It  is  his  shibboleth,  to  use  a  bib- 
lical term  since  we  are  considering  parsons! 
He  has  it  on  his  lips  a  good  part  of  the  time ; 
for  this  kind  of  pastor  is  usually,  like  the  man 
in  the  Bible,  "willing  to  justify  himself." 

Pastoral  work  is  really  a  very  delicate  and 
exact  art.  It  requires  for  performance  a  high 
degree  of  acquired  skill,  no  matter  how  much 
natural  aptitude  moved  the  pastor  to  become  a 
clergyman;  and  the  attainment  of  such  desir- 
able competence  demands  exacting  preparation, 
attention,  and  devotion.  In  the  spirit  of  this 
elevating  idea,  let  us  sum  up  the  credit  and 


60        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

debit  of  the  two  opposite  views  which  should 
have  emerged  about  pastoral  calling. 

On  the  credit  side  it  must  be  admitted  that 
the  pastor  who  bases  his  ministry  upon  call- 
ing, as  very  many  pastors  do,  will  have  one 
powerful  working  tool  forged  by  himself  as  he 
walks  about  the  streets  of  his  city,  town,  or 
village.  He  will  have  personal,  intimate  knowl- 
edge of  his  people  and  their  affairs.  He  will, 
in  truth,  know  his  sheep.  This,  in  itself,  is 
magnificent.  In  the  course  of  a  reasonably  long 
pastorate  he  will  have,  if  he  be  possessed  na- 
turally of  any  kindly  qualities,  a  large  group 
of  intimate  acquaintanceships  and  close  friend- 
ships. But  even  here,  on  this  high  plane,  shelter 
cannot  be  legitimately  sought  under  the  aegis 
of  the  Lord's  command.  It  was  "feed  My 
sheep"  that  He  enjoined  upon  Peter  and  the 
other  Apostles.  It  was  of  Himself  that  He 
said:  "I  knoiv  My  sheep,  and  am  known  of 
Mine ; "  so  that,  however  great  may  be  the  force 
of  the  example  followed,  and  it  is  the  very  best 
possible  example,  it  has  not  the  direct  force  of 
a  divine  command. 

On  the  debit  side,  however,  it  may  fairly  be 
contended  that  the  pure  caller  loses  infinitely 
more  than  he  can  possibly  gain  by  adherence 
to  his  peculiar  course.  When  he  dies  or  leaves 
his  parish  for  another  he  will  take  along  with 
him  all  the  intimate,  valuable  data  so  labor- 
iously accumulated  and  built  up  along  with  his 
friendships,  but  he  will  not  necessarily  have 
built  up  his  parish,  either  as  a  spiritual  entity 
or  as  an  eleemosynary  corporation.  He  will 
have  made  the  work  of  his  successor,  any  sue- 


KNOWING  ONE'S  SHEEP  61 

cesser,  exceedingly  difficult,  even  though  an- 
other ' '  caller ' '  succeed  him.  He  may  even  have 
hurt  his  health — in  spite  of  all  the  fresh  air  he 
has  been  breathing  all  these  years — because  of 
the  stress  to  which  he  has  subjected  himself  in 
the  doing  of  his  minimum  of  routine  other  than 
calling.  He  may  have  atrophied  his  scholarly 
faculties.  In  all  probability  his  records  will 
approach  the  chaotic,  for  the  typical  ''caller" 
carries  his  facts  in  his  head  (and  heart)  where 
they  are  not,  unfortunately,  accessible  to  his 
successor. 

Besides  all  this,  the  parish  will  have  become 
accustomed  to  the  minimum  of  routine  work 
being  done,  and  much  of  this,  on  the  fringe 
about  its  irreducibility,  by  the  hands  of  others 
than  the  pastor.  The  owners  of  these  hands 
will  have  become  habituated  to  the  perform- 
ance of  duties  which  the  pastor  should  have  at- 
tended to  but  which  he  could  not  do — and  call. 
These  may  not  all  be  pleasant  people.  There 
was  a  child  who  prayed  every  night,  we  may 
remember,  that  God  would  make  all  bad  peo- 
ple good,  and  all  good  people  nice !  Certain  of 
those  good  people  who  have  still  to  become 
' '  nice, ' '  will  have  got  hold  upon  a  certain  quasi- 
authority,  and  the  new  pastor  must  perforce, 
choose  between  ineffective  and  slipshod  meth- 
ods continuing  in  many  cases,  and  what  in  com- 
mercial life  is  called  a  "shake-up"  at  the  most 
inopportune  possible  time — just  after  his  ar- 
rival on  the  scene.  This  unfortunate  man's 
only  possible  "third  alternative"  is  the  exer- 
cise of  tons  of  tact,  a  process  exhaustingly  de- 
bilitating to  all  concerned! 


62        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

It  would  constitute,  perhaps,  another  for- 
ward movement  for  the  church  as  a  whole  if 
the  ''callers"  would  take  a  leaf  from  the  book 
of  that  humanitarian  colleague,  the  physician. 
It  is  an  educative  absurdity  to  imagine  a  suc- 
cessful medico  spending  the  bulk  of  his  precious 
time  dropping  in  on  sick  and  well  at  frequent 
intervals,  building  up  personal  friendliness 
through  uninvited  social  contacts,  and  offering 
gratuitous  advice  during  the  discussion  of  oc- 
casional symptoms,  to  say  nothing  of  the  price 
of  gasoline  these  days.  That  is  essentially  a 
modern  problem! 


V 

On  Church-Going 

The  question  of  church  attendance,  which 
probably  affects  four-fifths  of  the  population  of 
these  United  States,  has  received  treatment  at 
many  hands,  and  the  answers  when  thrown  to- 
gether make  curious  reading.  There  are  two 
camps  of  those  who  have  tried  to  formulate 
answers  to  the  question,  Why  Do  Not  People 
Go  to  Church?  There  are  those  who  believe 
that  the  reason  is  internal,  that  the  Church 
itself  is  at  fault.  On  the  other  hand,  many  be- 
lieve that  the  reason  is  outside  the  control  of 
the  Church  altogether  and  must  be  looked  for 
externally. 

Characteristic  explanations  based  upon  fault- 
ing the  Church  are  these :  1.  The  churches  have 
continued  to  recite  creeds  which  have  lost  their 
meaning,  and  the  inconsistency  arising  from 
this  concession  to  tradition  has  driven  thou- 
sands of  honest-minded  men  and  women  out  of 
sympathy  and  touch  with  organized  religion. 
2.  Social  justice  was  the  essence  of  Christian- 
ity's original  message  to  the  world,  and  since 
this  vital  aspect  of  Christianity  is  almost  totally 
neglected  in  the  churches,  the  masses  have  re- 
belled against  them.  3.  The  very  core  of  Chris- 
tianity is  the  healing  of  sickness.  It  is  central 
in  the  gospels,  and  its  practice  was  the  univer- 

63 


64        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

sal  credential  of  the  primitive  church.  Its 
abandonment  has  prompted  the  exodus  of  the 
people  from  the  churches.  4.  Individual  purity 
is  the  gist  of  Christ's  message.  The  modern 
Church  is  so  taken  up  with  extraneous  matters 
that  the  practice  of  piety  and  the  ethical  beauty 
which  once  crowned  Christian  fellowship  in  the 
Church  have  been  crowded  out  so  tliat  the  mass 
of  people  are  no  longer  attracted  to  imitate 
conspicuous  examples  of  personal  excellence, 
and  the  whole  Church  has  suffered  depletion. 
5.  Church  services  are  too  long  and  wearisome 
nowadays.  People  tired  by  the  week's  work 
find  them  a  bore  and  prefer  to  get  their  religion 
'  *  out  in  the  fields  with  God. ' ' 

On  the  other  hand,  there  is  a  whole  group 
representative  of  the  other  school:  1.  People 
want  rest  and  relaxation  on  Sunday,  the  natural 
holiday.  In  former  days  there  was  nothing 
else  to  do  on  Sunday  except  to  go  to  church. 
But  nowadays  cheap  amusement  has  put  relax- 
ation and  pleasure  within  the  reach  of  all,  what 
v/ith  moving  pictures  admitting  a  family  of  five 
for  the  cost  of  a  balcony  seat  for  a  play,  long 
trolley  rides  out  into  the  country,  and  the  un- 
precedented cheapness  of  automobiles.  People 
who  used  to  be  in  church  now  like  to  go  off  for 
the  day  in  their  machines.  2.  Beginning  with 
Tom  Paine  and  Ingersoll  there  has  been  a 
steady  discrediting  of  the  Bible  and  the  Church. 
The  Church  rests  upon  the  authority  of  the 
Bible,  and  the  attacks  of  critics,  once  outside, 
now  inside  the  Church  itself,  in  breaking  down 
the  authority  of  the  Bible  have  naturally  weak- 
ened the  foundations  of  the  Church  so  that  the 


ON  CHURCH-GOING  65 

man  in  the  street,  not  knowing  what  to  think 
of  the  whole  process,  has  cut  the  Gordian  knot 
of  his  difficulties  and  abandoned  a  discredited 
institution.  3.  It  is  quite  possible  to  live  a  good 
life  without  going  to  church.  Why  should  a 
man  equipped  with  "The  World's  Best  Ser- 
mons" and  a  daughter  who  can  play  and  sing 
hymns  for  him,  trouble  about  church  wdiicli  cuts 
into  his  only  day  of  rest!  One  pays  one's  bills 
and  lives  respectably;  what  more  could  one  do 
if  he  spent  all  of  every  Sunday  in  church? 
Besides,  people  outside  organized  religion  who 
never  go  to  church  are  more  charitable  and  de- 
cidedly pleasanter  companions  for  the  average 
person.  4.  "I  was  forced  to  go  when  I  was  a 
child.  Every  Sunday  my  father  made  us  all 
get  ready,  there  was  no  escape.  We  had  to  sit 
through  tv»ro  hours  of  it  mornings,  get  home, 
eat  a  cold  lunch,  and  go  back  in  the  afternoon. 
How  I  hated  it !  Now  that  I  am  a  man,  I  never 
go  myself,  and  I  wouldn't  have  my  children 
go  through  what  I  endured  for  anything  in  the 
world."  5.  Certain  persons,  regular  attendants 
at  church,  are  hypocrites  or  otherwise  show  an 
inconsistency  between  their  Sunday  regularity 
and  prominence  in  church  and  their  weekday 
practice  in  business  and  private  life.  People 
who  know  all  about  them  are  unwilling  to  be 
identified  with  the  same  course  of  procedure, 
and  they  stay  at  home. 

It  is  hardly  necesssary  to  comment  on  the 
various  grades  of  mentality  and  personal  atti- 
tude to  religion  revealed  in  these  answers. 
Their  diversity  shows  how  widespread  the 
question  has  become.    People  of  all  kinds  are 


66        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

busily  engaged  in  making  excuses  for  not  going 
to  church  and  the  same  people  are  asking  why 
church  attendance  falls  off.  If  any  one  of  these 
solutions  were  the  one  true  answer,  the  others 
would  be  relatively  unimportant.  If  all  were 
reasonably  sound  the  whole  matter  could  be 
reduced  to  a  discussion  about  the  relative 
importance  of  internal  and  external  reasons  for 
not  going  to  church.  One  side  would  hold  that 
there  exists  a  kind  of  impersonal  conspiracy 
against  the  churches  and  that  the  age  of  modern 
inventions  and  cheap  transportation  had  struck 
its  powerful  blow  in  the  age-long  battle  between 
science  and  religion,  while  the  other  would  hold 
to  the  view  that,  considering  the  uncertainty 
of  the  various  seekers  in  finding  good  reasons 
coupled  with  the  fact  that  the  falling  away  in 
church  attendance  is  very  modern,  the  fault 
must  lie  with  the  churches  themselves. 

The  fact  is  that  there  is  a  grave  fault  in 
every  one  of  the  solutions  already  noted.  With 
respect  to  creeds,  this  objection  applies  only 
to  the  quantitatively  inconspicuous  minority  of 
persons  who  are  at  once  highly  intellectual  and 
at  the  same  time  out  of  sympathy  with  credal 
orthodoxy.  Numerically,  their  defection  would 
hardly  be  noticeable.  Moreover,  creedless 
churches  are  not  immune  from  the  disease  of 
empty  pews.  The  social  justice  argument  for 
staying  away  from  church  is  about  contempora- 
neous with  the  emergence  of  that  doctrine  into 
the  modern  light  of  day.  The  abandonment  of 
any  widespread  effort  by  the  Church  at  healing 
bodily  sickness  could  be  dated  much  nearer  the 
post-apostolic  age  than  the  period  of  its  very 


ON  CHURCH-GOING  67 

modern  emphasis.  It  is  "the  saints"  of  every 
congregation  who  are  chiefly  interested  in  the 
fascinating  and  valuable  practice  of  personal 
purity,  and  these  have  received  their  quoted 
designation  because  they  never  miss  a  service. 
It  is  not  "the  saints"  that  have  left  the 
churches.  The  whole  tendency  in  the  conduct 
of  church  service  for  the  past  thirty  or  forty 
years,  too,  has  been  to  make  it  short  and 
"bright,"  even  sometimes  at  the  expense  of 
other  qualities. 

Upon  examination,  the  "external"  arguments 
suffer  the  same  fate.  A  Sunday  morning  trolley 
ride  is  a  rarity  indeed.  Even  in  places  where 
Sunday  "movies"  are  tolerated,  the  perform- 
ances do  not  begin  until  afternoon.  In  spite  of 
the  laudable  efforts  of  Mr.  Henry  Ford  the 
proportion  of  the  Christian  population  pos- 
sessed of  automobiles  remains  relatively  very 
small,  while  in  countless  instances,  especially 
in  the  country,  the  automobile  has  made  it 
possible  for  people  at  a  distance  to  attend 
church  more  regularly  than  ever  before.  The 
arguments  based  on  IngersoU,  criticism  of  the 
Bible,  living  a  good  life  away  from  church, 
childhood  disgust  therewith,  and  the  hypocrite 
argument  are  hardly  worth  while  lingering 
over.  They  answer  themselves,  and  they  were 
all  flourishing  in  the  days  when  every  respect- 
able person  went  to  church  as  a  matter  of 
course. 

Probably  those  who  hold  that  the  Church 
itself  is  to  blame  for  the  decline  in  church 
attendance  have  the  better  of  it,  but  the  general 
futility  and  unsatisfactory  nature  of  all  the 


68        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

characteristic  solutions  leave  much  to  be 
desired.  One  feels  instinctively  that  they  do 
not  touch  the  root  of  the  matter.  In  general 
their  exponents  reveal  three  fundamental 
misconceptions  of  Christianity,  and  they  are  at 
one  in  agreeing  to  ignore  what  is  perhaps  the 
most  striking  fact  connected  with  the  whole 
question. 

First,  there  is  the  widespread  idea  of  those 
Avho  have  tried  to  explain  why  people  have 
stopped  going  to  church,  that  Christianity  is 
taken  up  with  the  past  at  the  expense  of  the 
present  and  the  future.  A  fair  sample  is  the 
question,  based  on  a  false  antithesis,  recently 
asked  by  a  clergyman  very  conspicuous  in 
the  social  service  activities  of  New  York  City, 
addressing  a  large  religious  convention  in  New 
England:  "When  the  burning  question  of  to- 
day is  how  to  get  more  wages,  how  can  you  be 
satisfied  with  reciting  creeds?"  Perhaps  if 
there  were  more  Church  historians  and  corre- 
spondingly fewer  enthusiasts  about  the  "new" 
ideas  which  flourished  in  the  second  century 
and  died  (apparently)  in  the  fourth,  Chris- 
tianity would  be  more  intelligently  understood 
and  less  lightly  contemned.  Surely  the  lineage 
of  a  church  has  the  same  bearing  upon  the  life 
of  its  present  and  future  activities  as  the 
lineage  of  a  horse,  say,  has  upon  its  appear- 
ance, usefuhiess,  quality  and  value. 

Secondly  there  is  the  curious  obsession  that 
orthodoxy  is  rather  stupid  and  pithless.  The 
prepossession  in  favor  of  heretical  views 
marches  with  the  modern  revolts  against 
tradition,  even  the  best,  and  against  definitions. 


ON  CHURCH-GOING  69 

This  spirit  has  produced  free  verse,  feminism, 
cubism,  futurism  and  Protestantism.  Free 
versifiers,  feminists,  cubists,  futurists,  and 
Protestants  are  impatient  of  what  is  orthodox. 
But  curiously  enough  each  more  or  less  vaguely 
has  produced  or  is  producing  an  orthodoxy 
peculiar  to  itself.  The  logical  outcome  of  this 
process  is  to  defeat  the  end  of  every  one  of 
these  movements  by  diffusion  of  force.  The 
cycles  from  inception  to  lassitude  vary  in  length. 
The  force  concentrated  in  the  art,  literature, 
religion,  and  normal  domestic  life  of  the  civil- 
ized world  permeated  its  civilization  and  mel- 
lowed it  into  the  soil  from  which  the  sweet  and 
kindly  things  of  life  have  drawn  their  inspira- 
tion, and  from  this  source,  too,  has  been  derived 
the  vigor  characteristic  of  every  one  of  the  radi- 
cal movements. 

Thus  the  language  which  the  free  versifiers 
seem  so  curiously  to  distort  is  the  language 
which  the  sound  literature  of  the  ages  has  built 
up.  The  vigor  of  the  old  type  of  militant  suf- 
fragette w^as  derived  from  generations  of  an- 
cestors vigorous  from  the  acquiescent  usage  of 
a  system  the  militant  suffragette  did  her  violent 
best  to  destroy  before  she  became  tired.  The 
whole  cubist  and  futurist  programme  is  nega- 
tive, a  protest  against  the  normal  content  of  art 
produced  by  laborious  generations  of  creative 
craftsmen  whose  work  will  endure  for  the  satis- 
faction and  emulation  of  men  long  after  the 
mushroom  art  of  the  radicals  has  decayed  and 
been  forgotten.  Protestantism  falls  into  the 
same  category,  only  in  this  case  the  cycle  is 
longer.     Queen    Victoria's    carriage    was    not 


70        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

mobbed  by  suffragettes,  the  free  versifiers  are 
already  subsiding  save  for  a  spasmodic  utter- 
ance now  and  then,  but  as  recently  as  the  year 
1917  somebody  remembered  the  four-hundredth 
anniversary  of  Tetzel's  indulgence  auction  at 
Wittenberg  and  the  inception  of  Luther's  cru- 
sade; and  pageants  followed. 

The  third  characteristic  misconception  of 
Christianity  springs  from  the  confusion  of 
ethics  with  religion.  It  expresses  itself  in  a 
widely  held  vicAv  that  people  go  to  church  to  be 
good  and  in  the  curiosity  contradictory  parallel 
opinion  that  membership  in  a  church  must  be 
preceded  by  the  attainment  of  a  certain  stan- 
dard of  goodness ! 

In  the  face  of  all  this  massed  testimony  to  the 
superficiality  of  those  who  have  tried  to  explain 
why  people  do  not  go  to  church,  it  is  less  diffi- 
cult to  understand  how  they  have,  one  and  all, 
managed  to  ignore  a  fact  which,  once  appre- 
hended, floods  the  church  attendance  problem 
with  light.  It  is  that  Catholic  Christians  have 
not  ceased  going  to  church.  The  church-going 
question  is  purely  a  Protestant  problem. 

The  statement  that  Catholic  Christians  have 
not  ceased  going  to  church  is  not  limited  to  the 
popular  definition  of  "Catholics."  It  includes 
not  only  Catholics  of  the  Roman  obedience  but 
the  Eastern  Orthodox  and  the  Anglicans  as 
well.  Normal  Russia  is  not  behind  Ireland  as 
a  church-going  country,  and  the  truth  of  the 
statement  is  strikingly  illustrated  by  contem- 
plating the  diversity  in  this  respect  between  the 
Anglican  schools.  Anglican  Catholics  are  con- 
vinced Catholics ;  they  attend  church  with  per- 


ON  CHURCH-GOING  71 

sistent  regularity,  while,  in  general,  the  other 
kinds  of  parishes  suffer  as  badly  from  the 
empty  pew  disease  as  do  the  avowed  Sectarians 
themselves.^ 

To  those  who  profess  and  call  themselves 
Catholics,  God  is  emphatically  not  a  vague,  leni- 
ent deity  who  does  not  care  particularly  what 
goes  on  among  mankind  so  long  as  bills  are  paid 
and  respectable  lives  lived.  Rather,  He  requires 
the  constant  co-operation  of  men  that  His  pur- 
poses for  them  may  be  effected.  Catholic  peo- 
ple would  as  soon  expect  God's  love  to  operate 
in  them  without  their  intimate  and  constant 
co-operation,  which  involves  steady  worship  in 
church,  as  to  expect  the  city  power  station  to 
boil  water,  toast  bread,  and  light  the  cellar 
without  wires  and  the  necessary  apparatus 
Avhich  the  householder  must  provide.  Common 
worship,  more  particularly  Eucharistic  worship 
involving  sacrifice  as  instituted  by  the  Founder 
of  Christianity  Himself,  is  regarded  as  the  very 
essence  of  co-operation  with  God.  The  convic- 
tion of  Catholics  that  this  kind  of  worship,  in 
which  everybody  takes  active  part,  is  absolutely 
necessary,  is  the  reason  why  people  of  this  per- 
suasion continue  to  go  regularly  to  church. 

Lacking  such  worship  and  the  conviction  that 
it  is  vitally  necessary,  the  Protestant  lacks  the 
compelling  desire  to  go  to  church.  Among  Cath- 
olic people  sermons  are  important  for  the  pur- 
poses of  teaching  and  exhorting  to  conversion 
and  good  works,  but  they  are  subordinate  to 
the  central  corporate  act  of  worship.  Textual 
and  literary  criticism  of  the  Scriptures  is  im- 
portant as  affecting  the  exact  meaning  of  the 


72        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

great  book  which  the  Church  itself  produced 
early  in  its  history  and  which  is  used  devotion- 
ally  and  to  prove  what  the  Church  continues  to 
teach.  Creed  revision  or  elimination  is  not  an 
issue  v/ith  Catholic  people.  To  them  the  creeds 
form  useful  summaries  of  what  they  believe  and 
frame  their  lives  upon.  They  are  not  impa- 
tient of  the  limitations  of  exact  definition.  The 
object  of  religion  to  the  Catholic  is  the  ultimate 
attainment  of  union  with  God  and  the  preserva- 
tion of  this  union,  which  is  broken  by  sin  and 
restored  again  by  penitence,  a  sacramental  mat- 
ter. Religion  is  not  merely  "being  good," 
although  this  is  a  very  important  part  of  it. 
Eucharistic  worship  is  a  constant  reminder  of 
social  service  on  a  large  scale.  The  Incarnation 
is  an  inspiration  to  justice,  personal  and  social, 
and  health  goes  hand  in  hand  with  the  good 
morals  which  flow  from  Eucharistic  worship — 
like  streams  from  a  perennial  spring.  Individ- 
ual purity,  too,  is  entirely  consistent  with  con- 
stant reminders  of  the  purest  life  ever  lived. 
The  individual  Catholic  has  as  much,  usually, 
as  he  can  manage  preserving  his  sense  of  union 
with  God,  without  much  critical  attention  to  the 
morals  and  conduct  of  his  fellow  Christians. 
Catholic  children  notoriously  do  not  "hate 
church."  Emphatically,  too,  the  religion  of 
Catholic  people  is  not  mechanical.  Nothing  that 
lives  can  rightly  be  called  mechanical,  although 
there  is  in  true  efficiency  much  that  suggests  the 
mechanical — smoothness,  ease,  and  rhythm.  In 
the  worship  of  Catholic  people,  beauty  seems  to 
belong  as  of  right,  and  art  in  noble  fabric  and 
glorious  sound  plays  it.s  enhancing  part. 


ON  CHURCH-GOING  73 

When  Protestantism  is  compared  with  this 
kind  of  religion,  and  especially  when  the  wide- 
spread laxity  and  indifferentism  of  Protestant 
people  in  the  matter  of  church  attendance  is 
compared  with  the  conspicuous  loyalty  of  those 
of  the  various  Catholic  foUowings,  the  conclu- 
sion that  Protestantism  has  nearly  completed 
its  cycle  of  activity  and  usefulness,  seems  not 
too  drastic,  and  logically  allied  with  the  fate  of 
the  other  radical  movements  with  which  it  has 
been  compared.  For  Protestantism  is  tired,  it 
has  burned  itself  out,  and  it  is  nearly  spent  as 
a  true  religious  force.  To-day  it  is  very  largely 
concerned  with  matters  which  would  have  been 
outside  the  thought  of  its  many  founders.  The 
body  of  teaching  in  most  first-rate  Protestant 
theological  seminaries  differs  widely  from  what 
the  founders  of  the  various  denominations 
would  have  considered  central  and  vital.  When 
this  or  that  denomination  was  founded,  certain 
doctrines  or  one  doctrine  received  emphasis  and 
much  of  the  teaching  of  the  Mother  Church  was 
minimized  or  discarded;  then  in  course  of  time 
new  ideas  began  to  find  room  in  the  denomina- 
tion, reactions  occurred,  and  new  points  for 
emphasis.  In  many  cases  the  emphasis  passed 
wholly  away  from  doctrine,  leaving  the  denomi- 
nation logically  without  excuse  for  existence.  A 
new  type  of  minister  and  a  new  type  of  layman 
grew  up.  In  some  cases  the  reactions  were  in 
the  direction  of  alignment  with  abandoned  us- 
age or  practice,  in  others  the  reaction  went  the 
other  way;  sometimes  the  original  emphasis 
was  wholly  abandoned,  often  new  needs  were 


74        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

met  by  the  denomination  by  radical  changes  of 
polity. 

Paralleling  these  varied  processes  has  been 
the  crystallization  of  all  Protestant  thought  into 
certain  fixed  principles  common  to  the  denomi- 
nations and  uniformly  opposed  to  the  general 
trend  of  Catholic  thought,  tradition,  and  de- 
velopment. By  this  process,  in  spite  of  its  in- 
ternal, denominational  diversities,  there  have 
grown  up  in  Protestantism  the  common  ideas  of 
an  unornate  worship;  of  the  preponderating 
importance  of  the  prophetical,  there  being  no 
priestly,  office;  of  individual  liberty  of  scrip- 
tural interpretation;  the  very  modern  emphasis 
on  ^'works''  so  obvious  in  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  ideals 
and  the  subject  matter  of  interdenominational 
conferences.  Finally,  it  is  unquestionable  that 
from  the  very  beginning  Protestantism  has 
cherished  and  fostered  the  view  that  the  Bible 
is  the  final  authority  in  all  matters  of  doctrine, 
discipline,  and  worship.  Such  a  substitution  of 
a  book 's  authority  for  the  authority  of  a  living 
organism,  the  Church,  was  the  inevitable  result 
of  the  radical  separation  germane  to  every  na- 
tional and  local  reformation  except  the  English. 

To  the  Catholic,  therefore,  however  greatly 
he  may  love  his  Protestant  friends  and  how- 
ever he  may  admire  their  attainments,  worth, 
and  respectability,  it  seems  certain  that  Protes- 
tantism has  nearly  spent  itself.  He  finds  gen- 
erally in  Protestantism  a  lack  of  real  interest 
in  the  vital  things  of  the  kingdom  and  on  all 
sides  he  hears  the  complaint:  Why  Do  Not 
People  Go  To  Church?  He  thinks  he  can  tell 
why,  too,  as  he  looks  about  him  and  sees  where 


ON  CHURCH-GOING  75 

from  Ms  owai  point  of  view  his  Protestant 
friends  and  neighbors  have  managed  to  get  far 
away  from  the  norm  of  Christianity,  whose  pri- 
mal verities  of  worship,  faith,  conduct,  order, 
and  authority  he  sees  efficiently  exemplified  in 
his  own  branch  of  the  Catholic  Church.  If  he 
happens  to  recall  the  Montanists,  the  Sabellians, 
the  Apollinarians,  and  other  of  the  early  fol- 
lov\ings  which  came  out  of  the  Mother  Church 
and  perished,  he  will  be  inclined  to  believe  that 
he  sees  history  repeating  itself.  He  begins  to 
realize  why  people  are  not  attracted  to  churches 
which  have  discarded  the  sacramental  idea  and 
the  commissioned  priesthood  and  the  soul-satis- 
fying Eucharistic  worship.  He  sees  among 
these  churches  disunion  and  the  beginnings  of 
the  disintegration  which  the  fulfilling  of  the 
cycle  involves.  He  investigates  the  faith  and 
practice  of  his  friends,  and  intellectual  and 
social  equals,  and  he  observes  that  in  too  many 
instances  their  religion  is  merely  intellectual 
and  chilly.  He  contemplates  that  large  portion 
of  the  American  middle  class  which  is  the  back- 
bone of  Protestantism  and  he  finds  that  emo- 
tionalism has  largely  replaced  for  them  much  of 
the  sober  common  sense,  the  bread  and  meat 
of  the  gospel,  and  in  many  quarters  the  com- 
monplace, deadly  obsession  of  teetotalism  re- 
placing vigorous,  normal,  self -restrained  living, 
the  ban  on  the  dance,  and  the  horror  at  cards 
bound  up  with  neglect  of  the  weightier  matters 
of  the  law.  He  reads  the  circuit  rider  narra- 
tives of  Corra  Harris  and  compares  the  attitude 
revealed  in  them  of  Protestant  people  to  their 
ministers  with  his  own  love  and  respect  for  his 


76        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

pastor,  and  then,  turning  to  the  modern  min- 
ister he  finds  him  and  his  modern  church  busily 
engaged,  when  at  their  best,  in  all  kinds  of  ex- 
traneous things,  forgetting  that  neighborhood 
entertainments  and  manual  training  and  danc- 
ing classes  (in  the  liberal  denominations)  and 
even  successful  boy-scouting  have  little  to  do 
with  making  God  the  centre  of  the  universe  and 
leading  all  men  into  union  with  Him.  He  finds 
churches  pervaded  with  a  musty  chill,  where  the 
majesty  of  God  is  dwarfed  and  His  splendor 
pale.  He  listens  to  the  renditions  of  self-con- 
scious quartets,  he  listens  to  the  more  intellec- 
tual parsons  holding  forth  on  such  subjects  as 
Pragmatism  in  Maeterlinck,  and  the  Color  Val- 
ues in  the  Work  of  Robert  Hichens;  and  he 
notices  grape  juice,  and  melodeons,  and  insup- 
erable prejudice  against  "Catholics." 

He  sees  and  hears  all  these  things,  and,  taking 
thought,  he  becomes  very  unhappy,  but  in  the 
process  he  acquires  an  illuminating  insight  into 
the  reason  why  people  do  not  go  to  church. 


VI 

The  Question  of  Clebical  Marriage 

All  religious  organizations  have  burning 
views  on  the  question  of  the  marriage  of  their 
ministries.  Among  Christians  of  all  kinds  this 
is  a  subject  of  perennial  interest.  Protestant 
denominations  in  general  regard  the  marriage 
of  a  minister  as  the  ordinary  condition  of  his 
respectability  and  are  inclined  to  look  askance 
upon  one  who  has  managed  to  keep  single.  The 
Eastern  Orthodox  must  marry  before  ordina- 
tion. Roman  Catholics,  with  certain  exceptions, 
are  not  allowed  to  marry.  Anglican  clergy  may 
do  as  they  please  about  it.  This  summary  in- 
cludes all  kinds  of  Christians,  but  because  of 
the  Roman  and  Eastern  rulings  and  the  Prot- 
estant, crystallized,  public  opinion,  the  real 
question — so  far  as  it  is  open  to  discussion — is 
limited  to  Anglicans. 

Among  Anglicans  the  usual  discussion  about 
the  marriage  of  the  clergy  is  often  colored  by 
insistence  on  what  may  be  termed  the  Spiritual 
Argument,  and  is  forced  into  the  terms  of 
churchmanship.  But  it  need  not  be  placed  on 
these  grounds  nor  so  distorted  and  complicated, 
for  overwhelmingly  it  is  an  economic  and  tem- 
peramental problem,  chiefly  economic.  There 
are  probably  as  many  married  clergy  of  the 
Catholic  school  of  thought  among  Anglicans  as 

77 


78        THE  GAEDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

there  are  among  the  other  types  of  churchmen ; 
and  conversely,  there  are  unquestionably  as 
many  unmarried  clergy  of  other  schools  as 
among  the  members  of  the  Catholic  school. 
Quantitatively  at  least  this  is  not  a  question  of 
churchmanship  at  all. 

It  is  interesting  to  note,  in  this  connection, 
however,  that  to  the  typically  Modernist  mind 
in  Anglicanism,  to  which  the  personal  example 
of  the  Man,  Jesus,  is  paramount  and  human  ex- 
pediency the  ultimate  test,  the  Spiritual  Argu- 
ment is  anathema.  And  yet  this  is  curiously 
inconsistent. 

There  is  a  group  in  Anglicanism  which  char- 
acteristically centralizes  such  matters  as  Fem- 
inism, the  ''Social  Leadership  of  Jesus,"  the 
New  Morality,  the  destructive  type  of  biblical 
criticism,  and  social  service.  The  lips  of  these 
persons  frame  readily  the  word  ''modem." 
They  deprecate  as  mediaevalisms  such  matters 
as  a  serious  Christology,  penance,  sacraments, 
and  sacerdotalism  (horrid  fetich!)  and  who, 
having  long  abandoned  belief  in  the  deity  of 
Jesus,  have  been  led  by  their  mental  processes 
far  in  the  direction  opposite  to  the  tendency  in 
the  Papal  Church  which  sought  to  emphasize 
our  Lord's  divinity  by  the  bad  theology  of  the 
Dogma  of  the  Immaculate  Conception. 

It  is  to  these  that  the  example  of  the  Man 
Jesus  can  be  held  up  with  propriety,  because 
from  it  they  claim  to  derive  their  peculiar  sys- 
tem. Of  course  according  to  their  reasoning 
much  tliat  our  Lord  said  must  be  rejected  as  not 
squaring  with  the  tji^ical  bias  of  the  Modernist; 
m.uch  that  He  did  must  be  reinterpreted.    But 


CLEEICAL  MARRIAGE  79 

even  the  lazy  Modernist  who  has  not  yet  real- 
ized that  eschatology  is  out  of  date  and  Guild 
Socialism  the  only  panacea,  must  realize  that 
there  is  one  course  of  conduct  pursued  by  our 
Lord  which  no  speciously  destructive  criticism 
can  obscure  or  pervert.  The  great  Precursor 
of  the  Social  Revolution,  the  person  who  uttered 
the  Call  of  the  Carpenter,  remained  unmarried! 
To  the  orthodox  of  all  Christian  cults  it  is  de- 
voutly obvious  why  God  Incarnate  did  not, 
could  not,  marry.  But  to  those  who  deny  His 
identity  with  God,  it  remains  at  once  an  insol- 
uble mystery  and  an  insurmountable  stumbling- 
block  that  He  did  not. 

It  is  proposed  to  discuss  briefly  the  problem 
of  clerical  marriage,  in  the  only  field  where  it 
is  logically  open  for  discussion — the  Anglican 
Communion — from  the  point  of  view  of  the 
question:  What  is  the  mind  of  the  Church  in 
this  question  of  clerical  marriage^ 

It  may  be  asserted  summarily  that  on 
grounds  of  barest  efficiency  a  Church  in  which 
most  of  the  clergy  are  married  is  thereby  ipso 
facto  debarred  from  doing  its  best  work;  be- 
cause of  the  nature  of  that  work;  because  the 
married  priest  cannot  live  easily  with  slum- 
dwellers  at  home  or  in  the  mission  field  as  he 
should  to  reach  them;  because  he  and  his  wife 
cannot  live  anj^vhere  on  the  stipend  which 
would  be  just  enough  for  him  alone ;  because  he 
cannot  give  to  his  children  educational  and 
other  opportunities  such  as  they  are  normally 
entitled  to;  because,  in  general,  he  is  inhibited 
from  giving  his  entire  energy  to  his  priestly 
work  when  he  is  obliged  of  necessity  to  devote  a 


80        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

great  deal  of  it  to  his  wife  and  his  own  family 
affairs. 

What  is  here  called  the  Spiritual  Argument, 
if  considered  at  all,  also  tells  against  clerical 
marriage.  Those  who  hold  that  for  spiritual 
reasons  a  priest  should  not  marry  understand 
that  he  is  wedded  to  his  sacred  office,  the  cause 
of  Christ  Whose  servant  he  is,  and  Whom  he  is 
constrained,  in  this  respect,  to  imitate.  It 
would  appear  that  this  whole  argument  is 
spoiled  by  its  inconsistency.  For  if  Christ's 
servant  should  refrain  from  marriage  because 
He  was  not  married,  he  should  refrain  from  liv- 
ing in  a  rectory  or  clergy  house  because  He  had 
not  where  to  lay  His  head;  he  should  exercise 
either  a  peripatetic  ministry,  which  would  inter- 
fere "with  the  whole  system  of  Church  organiza- 
tion, or  else  he  would  be  constrained  to  rely 
upon  the  hospitality  of  his  parishioners.  It 
seems  strained. 

There  are  not  lacking,  however,  among  the 
protagonists  of  this  argument  even  the  extreme 
views  that  marriage,  in  the  case  of  a  priest,  is 
a  violation  of  the  spirit  of  ordination  vows,  and 
that  marriage  is  morally  wrong.  Historically 
the  claim  is  made  that  the  whole  Catholic 
Church  discountenances  the  marriage  of  priests 
the  modern  exceptions  being  the  Anglicans  since 
the  Reformation,  and  the  Uniats.  It  is  held 
that  the  custom  of  the  Eastern  Church  cannot 
be  cited  against  this  claim  because  the  marriage 
of  its  clergy  takes  place  before  ordination,  and 
a  priest-widower  may  not  remarry.  It  is  con- 
ceded that  an  Anglican  priest  possesses  the 
right  to  marry  which  was  specifically  secured 


CLERICAL  MARRIAGE  81 

for  him  at  the  Reformation  Settlement,  but  it 
is  thought  that  he  should  not  take  advantage  of 
that  right.  Even  if  it  be  pointed  out  that  St. 
Peter  himself  had  a  wife,  as  witness  Holy  Writ, 
it  is  made  clear  that  he  had  her  before  he  be- 
came an  Apostle  and  well  before  the  Cliristian 
ministry  was  inaugurated  and  its  principles  de- 
fined. No  objection  is  made  to  a  man  already 
married  seeking  Holy  Orders. 

Having  cleared  the  ground  as  much  as 
possible,  we  come  to  the  practical  side  of  the 
question.  Here  we  would  plead  that  no  clergy- 
man or  prospective  clergyman  and  no  woman 
ought,  in  fairness  to  the  Church  and  to  them- 
selves, to  consider  getting  married  to  each  other 
without  grave  consideration  of  the  responsibili- 
ties peculiar  to  the  state  they  contemplate.  The 
considerations  which  do  occur  to  the  clergy, 
and  their  prospective  spouses  are  often  wide 
of  the  mark.  Mr.  Newbury  Frost  Read,  in  the 
American  Church  Monthly  for  May,  1918, 
estimated  that  the  average  gross  income  of  the 
clergy  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  from 
ecclesiastical  sources  of  all  kinds  was  $974.60 
per  annum.  It  ought  clearly  to  be  understood 
beforehand  that  marriage,  on  merely  economic 
grounds  and  apart  from  the  personalities 
involved,  frequently  presages  the  vitiation  of 
the  clergyman's  highest  usefulness  to  the 
Church  and  the  subjection  of  a  gentlewoman 
to  drudgery.  In  spite  of  such  instances  of  the 
abuse  of  clerical  ceUbacy  of  the  enforced  variety 
as  may  be  brought  forward  per  contra,  it  is  fair 
to  ask  if  the  unquestionable  eflficiency  of  the 
Church  of  the  Papal  Obedience  is  not  very 


82        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

largely  due  to  the  concentration  of  its  officials 
upon  their  specific  work,  and  their  entire  free- 
dom from  domestic  preoccupations  such  as  are 
inevitable  in  the  life  en  famille. 

In  the  matter  of  temperament  mingled  with 
household  economics,  it  might  be  very  interest- 
ing to  subjoin  a  few  examples  taken  from 
acquaintance  and  actual  observation.  Unfor- 
tunately this  cannot  be  done.  The  present 
writer  is  a  human  being  and  weak  and  refuses 
to  sacrifice  his  peace  of  mind  for  the  rest  of 
his  life  in  this  world  for  the  excellent  purpose 
of  illustrating  what  he  desires  to  convey  to  his 
readers  out  of  his  experience  in  contact  with  a 
host  of  married  clergy  and  their  wives  and 
families.  For  among  these  he  numbers  many 
of  his  best  and  most  valued  friends.  Therefore 
purely  hypothetical  cases  will  have  to  serve  in 
lieu  of  "true  stories,"  but  they  are  presented 
in  the  reasonably  confident  hope  that  these 
thumbnail  sketches  are  true  enough  to  life  to  be 
at  once  recognized  as  fair  examples. 

So,  then,  we  will  begin  with  Smith,  a  godly 
and  learned  parson  who  has  been  rector  of  a 
well-to-do  parish  in  a  conservative  New  Eng- 
land town  for  the  past  thirty  years.  He 
receives  $2500,  annually,  though  he  must  not 
be  thought  of  as  having  enjoyed  such  an  income 
all  through  his  pastorate  there.  His  wife  is 
a  splendid  person  with  every  imaginable  good 
quality  including  that  of  being  a  good  mother. 
Between  her  and  Smith  there  is  established  an 
ideal  companionship.  She  knows  the  parish 
better  than  anyone  else  and  the  parish  approves 
of  her.    She  is  a  parochial  necessity  to  Smith. 


CLERICAL  MARRIAGE  83 

If  she  should  die,  he  would  be  all  at  sea  in  his 
work,  and  the  parish  never  could  replace  her. 
Smith  has  an  enormous  area  to  cover,  extending 
for  several  miles  in  every  direction  from  the 
''Center"  where  the  Church  property  is 
located.  For  many  years  he  has  seen  that 
extension  work  should  be  undertaken,  but  it 
could  not  be  done  without  a  curate.  He  cannot 
afford  even  a  small  motor  because  his  children 
(and  they  are  dears)  John  and  Margaret, 
Sallie,  Edward,  and  Edith,  have  kept  him  busy 
scraping  and  grinding  for  many  years. 

If  Smith  had  not  married  when  he  came  to 
that  parish  thirty  years  ago  he  would  have 
missed  a  great  deal  of  domestic  joy,  but  by 
being  immersed  in  family  cares  he  has  found  it 
impossible  to  know  that  other  and  perhaps 
deeper  joy  of  a  worthy  task  adequately  fulfilled. 
Of  course  the  loss  to  the  parish,  in  thirty  years 
of  incessant  preoccupations  with  the  family 
which  have  absorbed  the  bulk  of  its  rector's 
time  and  energy,  is  simply  incalculable.  If  he 
had  remained  unmarried,  and  missed  what  he 
could  never  have  realized  in  the  matters  of 
domestic  life,  he  could  have  had  that  curate  long 
ago;  he  could  have  studied  more,  that  is,  ade- 
quately. On  his  salary,  two  priests,  even  three  at 
a  pinch,  could  have  been  accommodated  in  the 
rectory,  and  they  could  have  lived  better  than 
the  seven  members  of  his  family  have  ever 
been  able  to  live.  It  costs  much  less  to  keep 
three  men  than  seven  persons,  five  of  them 
with  the  variations  of  growing  appetites  to  say 
nothing  of  schooling  and  shoe  leather.  And 
with  the  many  more  people  who  might  have 


84        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

been  brought  to  know  and  love  God  and  to 
active  Church  membership,  it  is  highly  probable 
that  more  funds  could  have  been  raised.  It  is 
also  fair  to  use  the  imagination  upon  how  much 
more  efficient  Smith  might  have  become  if  he 
had  been  obliged  to  do  his  pastoral  work  him- 
self instead  of  leaving  a  great  deal  of  it  to  his 
splendid,  self -immolating  wife.  There  are  also 
many  lines  in  Smith's  kindly,  fifty-five  year  old 
visage  which  were  not  put  there  by  the  anxieties 
of  his  parochial  cure,  and  we  need  not  blame 
Smith  if  he  asserts  mentally,  as  he  looks  fondly 
at  his  sweet  wife 's  lined  face  and  his  five  robust 
progeny,  that  he  would  not  change  places  with 
his  classmate  Robinson,  who  remained  unmar- 
ried, though  a  year  older,  and  has  built  up  an 
enormous  work  in  a  Southern  Missionary  Dis- 
trict and  is  about  to  be  made  a  bishop ! 

There  is  Jones  and  his  wife.  Mrs.  Jones  re- 
tains her  attractive  appearance,  but  she  has 
never  been  strong,  and  several  years  ago  Jones 
gave  up  the  ministr^^  so  that  as  a  bond  salesman 
he  might  earn  enough  to  pay  her  doctor 's  bills, 
live,  and  gradually  reduce  his  debts. 

Jenkins,  situated  likewise,  sticks  to  the  work 
of  the  ministry  for  which  he  was  solemnly  or- 
dained, although  some  of  his  wife's  relatives 
consider  him  rather  heartless  for  doing  so.  He 
is  heavily  in  debt,  and  he  does  his  poor,  discour- 
aged best  to  keep  up  and  not  let  his  parish  slip 
through  his  fingers.  Mr.  Bings,  the  local  banker 
and  his  senior  warden,  rules  the  parish  with  a 
rod  of  iron,  and  would  like  to  have  a  younger 
man  who  w^ould  do  more  with  the  young  people 
and  preach  snappier  sermons,  as  he  calls  them. 


CLERICAL  MARRIAGE  85 

Jenkins  is  tied  hand  and  foot  because  Mr.  Bings 
holds  the  purse-strings  in  that  parish  and  he 
could  not  go  elsewhere  even  if  he  were  invited, 
because  Mattie  thinks  she  does  well  in  the  Wil- 
kinston  climate  and  would  not  hear  of  moving 
to  another  parish.  It  is  obvious  enough  why 
certain  laymen  with  the  Bings  disposition  pre- 
fer married  rectors. 

Tubbs'  wife  is  of  another  sort.  She  has  al- 
ways been  very  well  indeed.  She  is  full  of  en- 
ergy and  is  a  very  superior  person.  The  mem- 
bers of  the  Ladies'  Society  are  a  little  inclined 
to  resent  this  but  that  does  not  trouble  Mrs. 
Tubbs  in  the  slightest  degree.  There  is  no  one, 
really,  for  her  to  associate  with  in  Pencilville 
anj^^ay,  and  she  cannot  understand  why  Gerald 
should  pay  so  much  attention  to  the  people  who 
are  always  in  his  mind.  Mrs.  Tubbs,  capable 
person,  is,  in  fact,  a  Lady  Rector.  She  knows  a 
great  deal  more  than  Tubbs  about  everything, 
and  whether  she  is  liked  or  not  by  the  parish- 
ioners is  a  matter  supremely  indifferent  to  her ; 
so  she  says,  and  it  must  be  true.  Although  she 
talks  a  great  deal  and  sometimes  gets  ''Mr. 
Tubbs,"  as  she  calls  him,  into  tight  places,  he 
is  very  devoted  to  her  and  admires  her  strength 
of  mind.  In  fact,  Tubbs  came  close  to  severing 
a  friendship  of  many  years'  standing  not  long 
ago  when  a  visiting  clergyman  told  the  story 
of  the  bishop's  wife  who  wrote  to  one  of  her 
clergy:  "We  do  not  ordinarily  confirm  in  Au- 
gust"; and  Mrs.  Tubbs  spoke  what  was  in  her 
mind  and  said  she  would  not  have  that  man 
in  her  house  another  time. 

Gibbs,  a  born  cracker-barrel  philosopher,  was 


86        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

doing  really  wonderful  work  in  tlie  Middle  West 
and  was  accounted  the  most  effective  man  in 
tlie  strategic  Missionary  District  where  his 
capabilities  had  full  scope.  But  Mrs.  Gibbs  was 
bent  upon  coming  East,  and  did  so  at  the  first 
opportunity,  bringing  Gibbs  with  her.  And  now 
Gibbs,  rector  of  a,  small  "fashionable"  parish, 
may  be  seen  any  day  swinging  along  the  well- 
kept  roads  of  his  suburban  cure,  dodging  auto- 
mobiles, and  stretching  his  legs  as  he  calls  it 
in  that  smug  countryside.  Gibbs  is  tongue-tied 
in  the  presence  of  his  smart  vestrymen  whose 
cocktails  and  cigarettes  and  country  club  he 
heartily  despises.  And  while  Mrs.  Gibbs,  happy 
in  her  intimacy  with  the  somewhat  overdressed 
wives  of  these  small  stock  brokers,  flits  like  a 
pleasant  butterfly  from  tea  to  dinner,  and  from 
dinner  to  dance  at  the  club,  Gibbs,  gnawing  his 
weather-hardened  lip,  ruminates  in  his  slovenly 
study  over  his  old  buckboard  and  his  seven 
mission  stations  in  Wiscota,  and  the  almost 
imperceptible,  reminiscent  odor  of  roasting 
prairie  chickens. 

Mrs.  Nobbs,  too,  has  the  social  bee  buzzing 
steadily  under  her  becoming  toque.  (Even  a 
serious  writer  may  keep  abreast  of  current 
nomenclature  in  millinery.)  She  did  not  find  it 
necessary  to  take  the  long  step  from  West  to 
East,  like  Mrs.  Gibbs,  to  land  her  in  an  environ- 
ment where  she  would  be  properly  appreciated. 
Mrs.  Nobbs  lived  all  her  own  adolescent  life  in 
the  suburbs.  Her  particular  desire  was  to  get 
permanently  into  the  great  city,  tantalizingiy 
familiar  through  occasional  theatre  and  supper 
parties  cut  short  too  oft  by  the  necessity  of 


CLERICAL  MARRIAGE  87 

catching  the  last  train  to  the  paternal  villa  at 
Bumblewood.  Now,  married  to  Nobbs,  curate 
in  a  great  metropolitan  parish,  she  has  daily 
access  to  these  cates  and  mummeries,  and  Nobbs 
wonders  if  he  can  possibly  keep  the  apartment 
going  next  year  on  the  same  salary  which  made 
many  a  substantial  gift  to  Eleanor  possible  in 
the  days  before  his  marriage,  when  he  was 
ensconced  in  the  commodious  clergy  house  at 
St.  Enurchus'. 

Leaving  the  temperamental  side  of  our  dis- 
cussion, and  delving  into  the  economic  aspects 
of  clerical  marriage,  we  discover  that  one  sali- 
ent fact  stands  clear.  This  is  that  whatever 
may  have  been  the  mind  of  the  Church  at  the 
time  her  clergy  were  first  allowed  to  marry  or 
remain  single  as  they  saw  fit,  there  can  be  little 
question  (when  one  looks  below  the  surface) 
as  to  her  present  attitude.  Overwhelming  evi- 
dence that  it  is  unfavorable  is  found  when  one 
examines  the  statistics  of  clerical  support.  It  is 
perfectly  obvious  that  the  salaries  provided  for 
clergymen  are  large  enough,  taking  an  average, 
to  live  on  with  reasonable  comfort,  with  all  the 
necessities  and  some  of  the  desirabilities  of 
life — as  single  men.  And  $974.60  per  year,  es- 
pecially in  these  days,  is  not  enough  to  support 
a  family  in  the  way  a  clergyman  is  expected  to 
live;  even  though  the  clergy  reverted  to  the 
charming  XVIII  century  custom  of  taking  wives 
from  the  classes  habituated  to  household  labor 
and  accustomed  to  a  relative  privation,  as  were 
those  who  sat  below  the  salt  and  whom  the 
parson  married  when  the  squire  commanded — 
a  fine  old  custom  with  much  to  commend  it  to 


88        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

penniless  seminarians  with  designs  on  young 
gentlewomen  without  private  incomes. 

The  exceptionally  large  clerical  salaries  are 
very  small  when  compared  with  the  financial 
rewards  of  the  various  non-clerical  professions 
and  the  kind  of  work  done  by  those  socially 
and  educationallj^  the  equals  of  the  reverend 
clergy.  And  these,  such  as  they  are,  are  rather 
strictly  confined — there  are  a  very  few,  sporadic 
exceptions — to  great  parishes  not  usually  in  the 
pastoral  charge  of  clergy  of  the  ordinary  mar- 
rying age.  Moreover,  there  can  be  little  ques- 
tion as  to  the  relative  effectiveness  parochially 
of,  say,  five  unmarried  clergy  living  together  in 
a  clergy  house,  and  two  married  clergy  living 
in  separate  establishments.  The  cost  for  each 
combination  w^ould  be  about  the  same. 

Therefore,  the  laity  being,  of  course,  pos- 
sessed of  common  sense,  both  the  clergyman 
and  the  lady  with  whom  he  is  engaged  in  a  mat- 
rimonial conspiracy  have  this  dilemma  to  face 
when  they  contemplate  getting  married:  are 
the  laity  merely  stingy;  or,  is  it  the  "mind  of 
the  Church"  that  its  financial  support  is  in- 
tended for  the  needs  of  unmarried  clergy? 
Either  there  is  a  well-nigh  universal  conspiracy 
to  starve  out  the  clergy  and  their  families — 
which  is  patently  absurd — or  the  facts  compel 
the  admission  that  the  Church  does  not  want 
her  clergy  to  be  married  or  she  would  provide 
support  for  their  families  and  take  chances  on 
getting  Lady  Rectors  and  Di-Rectors  mixed  in 
with  the  charming  ladies  who  usually  preside 
over  rectorial  and  curatial  dinners,  lunches  and 
breakfasts. 


CLERICAL  MARRIAGE  89 

The  writer  is  not  unmindful  of  the  Blind 
God,  or,  if  a  Christian  designation  be  preferred, 
of  that  which  St.  Paul  intimates  rhapsodically 
to  be  greater  than  the  mighty  virtuesi  of  faith 
and  hope.  True  love  transcends  material  con- 
siderations, is  independent  of  reason,  and  ele- 
vates the  lives  it  touches  with  its  caress  to 
planes  suffused  with  a  glory  as  of  perennial 
sunrise.  And  yet — it  is  peculiarly  irritating  to 
contemplate  the  spectacle  of  an  engaged  semi- 
narian who,  having  kept  the  faith,  comes  near 
the  end  of  his  course,  and  dickers  wildly  for  a 
job  that  will  support  a  wife!  One  feels  that 
those  boys  lack  discipline.  When  St.  Paul  said, 
"Let  the  deacon  be  the  husband  of  one  wife," 
he  meant  one  wife.  He  desired  that  the  clergy 
should  never  take  advantage  of  the  legal  oppor- 
tunity to  be  polygamous  in  an  oriental  environ- 
ment Avhere  such  procedure  was  rather  freely 
countenanced. 

Propinquity  and  the  will-to-love  are  the  fac- 
tors which  lead  up  to  a  marriage.  Both  can  be 
controlled,  as  being  in  a  given  place  and  any 
ordinary  state  of  mind  may  be,  rather  easily, 
controlled.  Intending  Benedicks  and  young 
(and  all)  ladies  who  aspire  to  preside  over 
rectory  tables  and  nurseries  might  well  ask 
themselves  pertinent  questions  like  these:  Is 
it  fair  for  me  to  subject  the  woman  I  want  to 
marry  to  what  is  in  store  for  her?  Is  it  wise 
for  me  to  risk  diminishing  the  pastoral  effec- 
tiveness of  the  man  I  want  to  marry? 

The  point  of  view  which  must  have  emerged 
as  being  held  by  the  writer  is  sometimes  thought 
of  as  a  selfish  one.     But  really  it  is  not.     It 


90        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

should  be  thought  of,  rather,  as  one  of  sacrifice. 
It  is  self-sacrifice  not  for  a  profession  but  for 
a  cause.  One  balances  the  cause  against  what 
one  desires  as  a  private  individual — in  this  case, 
marriage.  It  is,  of  course,  by  the  principle  of 
sacrifice  applied,  that  great  steeps  are  sur- 
mounted, great  obstacles  overcome,  great  works 
accomplished.  Sacrifice  involves  mysterious 
compensations,  and  these  leaven  a  worthy  life 
lived  for  a  great  cause.  Thus,  by  putting  away 
pride,  a  workable  humility  is  attained ;  by  cast- 
ing off  reposeful  ease,  the  hard  effectiveness  of 
mind  and  soul  and  body  are  gained;  by  the 
deliberate  sacrifice  of  domestic  joy  in  the  mari- 
tal state,  the  ends  of  God  are  often  best  served. 
These  considerations  are  presented  because, 
although  they  are  related  to  a  vital,  indeed,  a 
burning  question,  they  are  rarely  discussed. 
And  they  ought  to  be  discussed.  It  ought  to  be 
clear  enough  that  while  a  clergyman  is  morally 
as  well  as  canonically  free  to  marry,  too  many 
clergy  marry  as  a  matter  almost  of  routine.  In 
particular  the  apparent  feeling  among  many 
preparing  for  the  ministry  that  ordination  and 
marriage  normally  go  hand  in  hand  is  on  its 
merits  to  be  deprecated.  Very  many  married 
clergymen  would  have  been  more  profitable 
servants  if  they  had  been  willing  to  sacrifice 
domestic  life  and  give  themselves  unreservedly 
to  the  work  of  their  vocation,  exercising  deliber- 
ately the  principle  of  self-sacrifice  in  view  of 
the  fact  that  ordination  does  not  expunge  the 
qualities  of  manhood,  and  that  marriage  is  the 
normal  life  for  a  normal  man.  It  is  certain 
that  the  laity  as  a  whole  are  not  stingy  in  the 


CLERICAL  MARMAGE  91 

matter  of  clerical  support,  as  evidenced  by  their 
enormous  subscription  of  some  eight  million 
dollars  to  the  Church  Pension  Fund,  but  one  is 
forced  to  the  conclusion  that  the  standard  of 
clerical  support  abundantly  confirms  the  con- 
tention that  the  Church  as  a  whole  does  not 
desire  a  married  clergy. 

Public  utterance  on  this  subject  is  usually 
avoided  for  the  obvious  reason  that  few  care 
to  risk  getting  themselves  disliked.  When  the 
"anti"  side  is  presented  it  is  usually  by  one 
of  that  inconspicuously  tiny  minority  in  the 
Church  which  holds  to  the  Spiritual  Argument, 
and  whose  contentions  are  regarded  as  the  ful- 
rainations  of  medisevalists,  hence  negligible. 
More  has  been  written  and  spoken  on  the  other 
side.  Many  times,  for  example,  it  has  been 
alleged,  and  taken  for  granted,  too,  that  the 
Church  would  have  been  better  off  and  the 
course  of  human  progress  advanced  if  the  West- 
ern clergy  had  been  enabled  through  many  gen- 
erations to  bequeath  offspring  to  the  Church 
and  the  world,  to  inherit  their  carefully  segre- 
gated culture,  and  hand  on  their  worthy  tradi- 
tion. But  this  quite  gratuitously  assumes  that 
the  early  and  mediaeval  priesthood  would  have 
possessed,  as  men  of  family,  the  great  tradition 
and  carefully  nurtured  gifts  which  were  the 
very  fruit  of  that  self-sacrifice  which  kept  them 
unmarried ;  the  great  tradition  and  gifts  which 
blossomed  forth  in  the  lives  and  influence  of  the 
pastors,  saints,  and  doctors  of  the  past.  It  also 
overlooks  the  great  army  of  spiritual  progeny 
begotten  by  those  who  devoted  their  entire  en- 
ergies to  the  service  of  God.    Also  it  ignores 


92        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

atavism,  which  may  account  for  the  proverbial 
"cussedness"  of  minister's  sons! 

The  writer  is  also  inclined  strongly  to  agree 
with  those  who  believe  that  the  women  are 
the  chief  sufferers  in  clerical  marriages.  Cer- 
tainly if  selfishness  is  to  be  spoken  of  at  all, 
it  is  extremely  selfish  for  a  young  clergyman 
without  material  prospects  other  than  the  very 
moderate  financial  expectations  germane  to  his 
vocation  to  ask  a  young  woman  with  character 
to  share  with  him  certain  poverty  and  a  sordid 
struggle,  thereby  estopping  her  from  an  alli- 
ance with  some  layman  who  could  enable  her 
to  live  her  life  in  normal  surroundings. 

If  both  parties  to  a  matrimonial  engagement, 
clearly  understanding  what  is  in  store  for  them" 
are  utterly  willing  to  make  this  kind  of  sacrifice 
and  equally  unwilling  to  make  the  other  kind, 
perhaps  the  only  consideration  which  can  be 
presented  to  them  is  the  hope  that  in  fulfilling 
their  own  wishes  they  may  not  too  greatly  hin- 
der a  cause  of  infinitely  greater  importance 
than  their  own  personal  happiness  in  each  other 
— the  cause  of  Him  Who  subordinated  all  else 
to  the  task  of  saving  humanity,  and  Who  per- 
sisted until  He  met  His  death  upon  that  cross 
which  has  become  the  symbol  of  the  highest 
self-sacrifice. 


VII 

CEEEMONIAIi    IN    THE    AnGLICAN    ReVIVAL 

There  is  no  lack  of  persons  who  deprecate 
altogether  any  discussion  of  ceremonial,  seeing 
therein  nothing  but  a  waste  of  time.  But  if 
the  Holy  Scriptures  are  in  any  sense  the  word 
of  God,  such  a  view  must  be  wrong,  because 
much  of  the  text  of  Holy  Scripture  is  devoted 
to  ceremonial  directions.  Moreover,  mankind's 
estimate  of  its  importance  may  be  discovered 
in  any  lodge  room  or  at  any  civilized  dinner 
table.  Everyone  capable  of  self-expression  is  a 
ceremonialist  of  one  kind  or  another,  from  the 
bushman  standing  motionless  on  one  leg  to  the 
Caucasian  gentleman  who  removes  his  hat  when 
he  meets  a  woman  he  knows  in  a  public  place. 
It  is  only  when  religious  ceremonial  is  in  ques- 
tion that  there  ever  seems  to  be  any  question 
about  the  matter  whatever;  and  perhaps  the 
most  curious  bit  of  psychology  connected  with 
the  question  is  found  in  the  fact  that  those  who 
most  loudly  aver  that  it  is  of  no  importance, 
anyhow,  are  the  very  same  who  throw  them- 
selves most  vigorously  into  any  campaign 
against  it. 

It  is  a  commonplace  of  recent  history  that 
the  leaders  of  the  Oxford  Movement  placed  no 
emphasis  whatever  on  the  outward  and  visible. 
They  laid  afresh  the  foundations  of  most  that 

93 


94        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

is  soundest  in  Anglicanism  to-day,  but  they  for- 
bore to  cultivate  the  art  of  public  worship,  and 
these  leaders  have  always  had,  and  still  have, 
a  following  which  was  and  is  in  accord  with 
their  teaching,  but  which  was  and  is  so  conserv- 
ative as  to  be  chary  of  allowing  their  doctrinal 
catholicity  to  show  in  any  overt  act.  This  ultra- 
conservative  churchmanship  is  likely  to  be 
scholarly,  but  the  results  of  its  scholarship  seem 
never  to  have  advanced  beyond  the  academic 
stage;  while  at  its  worst,  it  is  a  kind  of  book- 
case religion  which  has  little  effect  upon  the  lay 
people  who  happen  to  live  under  its  aegis.  It 
appears  to  be  a  kind  of  complacent,  intellectual 
position,  strongly  held,  but  rarely  or  never 
used. 

The  effort  to  get  into  general  acceptance  and 
practice  the  principles  of  the  Book  of  Common 
Prayer  which  were  forced  into  recognition  by 
the  Oxford  Movement  is  one  well  worth  making. 
These  principles  as  well  as  the  principle  of  uni- 
formity of  practice  have  received  great  empha- 
sis from  the  war.  Acceptance  has  been  secured 
for  auricular  confession,  reservation  of  the 
Blessed  Sacrament,  and  prayers  for  the  dead 
among  Churchmen  of  various  stripes  and 
schools  who  had  been  previously  aligned  against 
these  practices  in  the  bitter  controversies  which 
only  yesterday  raged  about  them.  The  need  for 
such  practices  is  not  confined  to  the  American 
and  British  Churchmen  who  carried  on  the  war 
as  members  of  tlie  military  and  naval  forces  of 
their  countries ;  it  is  being  increasingly  felt  by 
the  wliole  Anglican   Communion.     Therefore, 


CEREMONIAL  95 

the  ground  is  happily  shifting  away  from  acad- 
emic discussion  and  written  controversy. 

There  is  apparent  a  strong  desire,  as  yet  in 
great  part  unexpressed  outwardly,  among  an 
ever-increasing  number  of  the  Church's  people 
tliat  the  Catholic  truth,  so  long  obscured,  sliould 
be  brought  to  light  and  translated  out  of  acad- 
emic expression  into  parochial  practice.  It  is 
felt  by  many  w^ho  have  never  been  taught  the 
whole  truth  that  the  whole  truth  should  be  pre- 
sented to  all.  They  think  that  it  will,  if  given 
the  opportunity,  fill  the  hearts  and  meet  the 
urgent  needs  of  people  who  are  really  weary 
of  the  negative  and  partial  systems  to  which 
they  have  of  necessity  become  habituated,  but 
of  which  they  are  far  from  enamoured.  The 
mere  use  of  the  phrase,  "our  incomparable 
liturgy,"  no  longer  thrills  the  average  Angli- 
can ;  if  he  is  to  get  a  thrill,  he  must  be  allowed 
to  see  the  wonders  of  that  incomparable  liturgy 
and  to  take  his  awed  part  in  its  highest  and 
lo»veliest  expression. 

The  negative  and  partial  systems  have  sur- 
vived at  all  only  because  of  inertia,  or  because 
of  the  deadlj^  power  of  that  tradition  which 
holds  that  change,  any  change,  might  offend 
someone.  That  change  for  the  better,  even  if 
necessary  without  regard  to  anyone's  private 
prejudices  or  preferences,  might  be  pleasing  to 
God,  is  an  opinion  which  has  been  very  slow  in 
laying  hold  upon  many  leaders  in  the  Anglican 
Communion.  The  obvious  catholicity  of  the 
Book  of  Common  Prayer  greatly  needs  popu- 
larization, and  to  effect  this,  a  certain  uniform- 
ity of  practice  in  public  worship  is  clearly  the 


96        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

first  essential.  The  widespread  neglect  of  the 
art  of  ecclesiastical  ceremonial  is  the  chief  con- 
tributory factor  to  the  present  condition  of  the 
Anglican  Communion  in  this  respect,  because 
it  is  through  the  ceremonies  of  the  Church  that 
the  Church  expresses  her  liturgical  mind. 

Many  dissatisfied  Churchmen,  having  studied 
somewhat  the  Church's  position,  and  realizing 
the  insufficiency  or  the  destructiveness  of  the 
churchmanship  to  which  they  have  been  sub- 
jected, make  the  considerable  temperamental 
leap  required  and  become  members  of  the  near- 
est available  parish  of  the  "advanced"  type. 
Others ,  who  realize  the  inadequacy  of  the 
churchly  system  in  which  they  have  been  nur- 
tured are  deterred  from  making  such  a  change 
for  family  or  other  similar  sentimental  reasons, 
but  when  one  puts  himself  into  the  place  of 
these,  it  is  easily  seen  why  such  good  people 
remain  where  they  are,  parochially,  despite 
their  dissatisfaction:  It  is  because  they  are 
convinced  that  the  other  kind  of  parish  has 
about  it  something  Roman!  The  tales  of  Ro- 
man Catholics  who  have  gone  ignorantly  into 
"  High- Anglican "  Churches  and  not  known  the 
difference,  laughable  as  they  appear,  have,  nev- 
ertheless, their  substantial  foundation  in  fact. 
This  is  entirely  because  of  outward  appear- 
ances. What  is  most  obvious  is  how  the  divine 
liturgy  is  celebrated,  the  altar  arranged,  and 
things  done  in  general. 

When  the  generation  which  followed  the  orig- 
inal Oxford  reformers  began  to  build  Churches 
— such  as  Mr.  Hubbard's  princely  gift  to  God 
of  St.  Alban's,  Holborn — and  to  put  into  prac- 


CEREMONIAL  97 

tice  the  doctrines  of  the  movement,  there  were 
few  sources  available  from  which  they  could 
have  derived  the  ceremonial  through  which  to 
express  that  teaching.  It  was  felt  that  there 
was  nothing  else  to  do  but  to  approximate  the 
usage  of  the  Church  of  Borne,  adapting  this  to 
the  liturgy  as  set  forth  in  the  Book  of  Common 
prayer.  Humanly,  it  is  easily  understood  why 
there  was  a  storm  of  protest.  Even  the  un- 
speakable Kensit  is  explicable  when  we  remem- 
ber the  shock  which  this  "Romanizing"  caused 
to  be  felt  throughout  Anglican  circles,  insignifi- 
cant as  were  the  detailed  practices  so  adopted. 
The  one  source  from  which  the  ''Puseyites" — 
as  Maehonochie  and  the  other  members  of  this 
group  were,  most  irrationally,  named — could 
have  derived  a  fairly  pure  Anglican  usage  was 
the  Coronation  Service ;  but  there  was  no  coro- 
nation until  many  years  later,  when  Queen 
Victoria's  death  brought  Edward  VII  to  the 
throne;  and  presumably  it  was  never  thought 
of  in  this  connection. 

In  the  United  States,  the  Roman  Catholic 
"Baltimore  Directory"  and  later  the  "Ritual 
Notes,"  published  in  England,  formed  the  chief 
sources  for  the  ceremonial  inaugurated  by  the 
followers  of  the  Oxford  reformers,  until  "The 
Ceremonies  of  the  Mass"  by  McGarvey  and 
Burnett  made  its  appearance  in  1905.  The 
authors,  both  first-rate  liturgical  scholars,  made 
their  researches  among  the  works  of  the  fore- 
most liturgiologists.  They  worked  out  in  detail 
the  application  of  the  best  and  soundest  known 
ceremonial,  in  principle  and  practice,  to  the 
Communion  Office  of  the  American  Book  of 


98        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

Common  Prayer,  producing  a  scholarly  hand- 
book of  directions.  This  book,  published  under 
the  auspices  of  the  Clerical  Union  for  the  Main- 
tenance and  Defense  of  Catholic  Principles,  put 
a  stamp  of  quasi-official  approval  upon  a  type 
of  ceremonial  which  was  much  like  the  modern 
Roman  ceremonial  as  codified  under  Piux  IX, 
because  worked  out  from  the  same  sound 
sources;  and  it  has  done  much,  without  any 
question,  to  crystallize  this  usage  in  the  Ameri- 
can Church. 

Now  it  is  a  fact  that  apart  from  the  causes, 
or  from  the  psychology  involved,  there  is  among 
people  not  of  the  Papal  obedience  a  very  mde- 
spread  and  deep-seated  dislike  for,  and  preju- 
dice against,  the  Roman  Church.  This  dislike, 
founded  in  certain  well-known  reasons,  is,  like 
most  similar  conditions  of  mind,  unreasoning, 
and  is  very  likely  to  be  stupid,  and  stupidly 
expressed.  Because  both  Pius  IX  and  the  for- 
mulators  of  the  accepted  ceremonial  usage  had 
access  to  the  same  sources,  the  ceremonies 
evolved  naturally  and  inevitably  have  much  in 
common ;  and  because  of  this  fact,  the  stupidity 
just  referred  to  was  unable  to  discriminate  be- 
tween sound  ceremonial  usage  as  such,  and  the 
fact  of  the  similarity.  Much  suspicion  and  dis- 
like was  foste|:ed  by  this  lack  of  discrimination 
on  the  part  of  the  critics,  whose  proudest  boast 
was  to  the  effect  that  they  did  not  understand 
ceremonial  and  did  not  want  to  understand  it! 
It  is  as  though  a  large  portion  of  the  American 
people  should  object  to  the  United  States  mili- 
tary and  naval  forces  wearing  uniforms,  be- 
cause the  German  forces  are  accustomed  to 


CEREMONIAL  99 

wear  very  similar  uniforms.  Adverse  critics 
of  Anglican  revival  and  self-expression  have 
found  common  ground  for  their  attacks  in  this 
accident  of  similarity,  and  the  observer  may 
readily  perceive  how  in  this  matter  a  common 
ground  of  ignorance  and  stupidity  makes,  like 
politics,  strange  bedfellows.  Thus,  Roman 
Catholics  habitually  scoff  at  what  they  say  we 
have  * '  stolen ' '  from  them ;  sectarian  people  are 
supplied  with  a  never-failing  fund  of  material 
for  drastic  criticism;  ''Modernists"  sneer; 
''Evangelicals"  hold  up  pious  hands  in  horror; 
and  ' '  Connecticut  Churchmen ' '  are  certain  that 
the  atmosphere  of  the  "advanced"  parish  is 
much  too  rarefied  for  them! 

Although  the  first  edition  of  The  Rev.  Percy 
Dearmer's  "Parson's  Handbook"  appeared  in 
April,  ]  899,  it  was  some  years  before  it  became 
very  well  known  in  the  United  States.  Even 
now  it  is  not  widely  known.  Anglicans  who 
realize  the  very  great  importance  of  sound  cere- 
monial are  pretty  thoroughly  committed  to  the 
standardized  type,  and  even  though  the  Dear- 
mer  ceremonies  had  been  of  such  nature  as  to 
appeal  to  them,  these  were  not  known  in 
America  until  well  after  the  McGarvey  and 
Burnett  ceremonies  had  taken  a  firm  hold  on 
the  practice  of  the  "advanced"  parishes.  Prob- 
ably no  advocate  of  Dr.  Dearmer's  system 
would  attempt  or  even  wish  to  have  it  replace 
the  ceremonies  now  generally  in  use,  which  the 
Anglican  Communion  has  an  unquestionable 
right  to  use,  and  for  which  right  many  saintly 
men  have  endured  bitter  persecution. 

But  there  is,  on  the  other  hand,  something 


100   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

to  be  said  about  the  common  attitude  towards 
the  book  in  which  the  classical  Anglican  cere- 
monies are  set  forth  by  Dr.  Dearmer.  This  is 
usually  dismissed  by  its  many  critics  as  the 
work  of  a  clever  scholar  which  is  ruined  and 
rendered  academic  and  impracticable  by  the 
author's  pronounced  archaeological  obsession. 
But  even  one  holding  such  a  view  must  admit 
two  things,  viz. :  that  Dr.  Dearmer  has  put  for- 
ever beyond  question  the  legitimacy  of  Angli- 
cans in  their  services  making  use  of  every 
requisite  of  Catholic  ceremonial ;  and  that  on 
grounds  drastically  conservative,  Anglican,  and 
even  anti-Roman.  There  can  never  again  be 
any  serious  question,  on  the  part  of  any  person 
capable  of  understanding  a  finished  demonstra- 
tion, about  the  facts  of  Anglican  ceremonial, 
because  Dr.  Dearmer  has  set  them  out  from 
exclusively  Anglican  sources.  And  except  for 
differences  in  petto  (e.  g.,  the  method  of  swing- 
ing a  censer,  and  similar  matters),  this  classical 
Anglican  ceremonial  is,  in  every  salient  partic- 
ular, concerned  with  the  same  ornaments  and 
the  same  actions,  and  the  same  materials  used 
in  connection  with  the  ceremonial  of  the  "ad- 
vanced" parishes.  The  differences  are  alto- 
gether differences  in  details;  the  legitimacy  of 
using  lights,  incense,  and  all  the  other  ''points" 
of  ceremonial  in  an  Anglican  Church  is  demon- 
strated. 

The  second  point  is  this:  that  Dr.  Dearmer 
has  supplied,  through  recourse  to  archaeology 
(though  not  having  to  go  back  very  far  as  an 
archaeologist  would  count  the  time),  a  system  so 
almost  aggressively  "Anglican"  that  logically 


CEREMONIAL  101 

it  should  appeal  to  all  those  who  dislike  the 
ceremonial  in  current  use  (because  it  seems  to 
them  "Eoman").  Many  of  these  desire  im- 
provement in  ceremonial  matters  because  they 
have  realized  how  very  destructive  and  un- 
worthy is  the  prevalent  carelessness  in  such 
matters  outside  the  field  covered  by  the  "ad- 
vanced" parishes.  In  "moderate"  and  "low" 
parishes,  it  is  submitted,  Dr.  Dearmer's  cere- 
monial, if  adopted,  and  adapted,  would  consti- 
tute a  really  enormous  improvement  over  the 
long-settled  state  of  muddle  about  public  wor- 
ship which  prevails  in  these  parishes,  wherein 
ceremonial  has  not  been  eliminated,  but  rather 
mixed  up,  wrongly  emphasized,  and  execrably 
performed.  Dr.  Dearmer's  recourse  to  archae- 
,'ology  is,  of  course,  a  necessity,  as  in  the  case 
of  anyone  who  would  re-state  and  codify  the 
Anglican  pre-Reformation  customs  and  prac- 
tices. He  resorts  to  it,  perforce,  in  his  desire 
to  conserve  and  revive  a  liturgical  heritage 
which  had  long  been  obscured  by  the  degenerate 
type  of  services  which  the  XVIII  Century 
brought  to  their  high  point  of  meretriciousness 
and  which  the  "safe"  parishes  have  kept  em- 
balmed. Dr.  Dearmer  has  painstakingly  ex- 
amined the  various  sources  and  authorities  on 
the  Anglican  Rite.  He  makes  his  chief  appeal 
not  primarily  in  the  matter  of  ceremonial  (which 
is  really  incidental  to  his  purpose)  but  against 
the  muddle  of  that  degenerate  Churchmanship 
just  referred  to,  which  has  starved  the  souls 
of  its  adherents  this  long  time  into  a  state  of 
negative  respectability.  His  outstanding  pleas 
are  in  favor  of  the  reunion  of  the  Church  with 


102   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

art,  the  sweeping  away  of  cobwebs,  the  empha- 
sizing of  salient  things,  and  the  restoration  and 
renewal  of  spiritual  living. 

The  kind  of  services  commended  by  Dr.  Dear- 
mer  to  the  Church  are  simple,  reverent  and  dig- 
inified.  Their  use  would  provide  much  aid  to 
worship,  and  should  do  much  to  destroy  the 
killing  tediousness  of  the  cut  and  dried  ' '  Morn- 
ing Service"  in  backw^ard  parishes.  It  wholly 
replaces  with  a  cogent  scheme  the  liturgical 
improprieties  which  have  persisted  to  absurdity 
in  all  too  many  places.  It  is  an  elastic,  homo- 
geneous, and  complete  system  intended  for 
practical  use;  and  it  is  armed  at  every  point 
against  the  sneers  of  our  Roman  brethren  and 
the  persistent  state  of  disturbance  among  cer- 
tain of  our  own  people  based  on  the  supposition 
that  Anglicans,  other  than  the  "Morning 
Prayer"  kind,  are  on  the  high  road  to  Rome! 

The  people  who  need  such  a  system  of  wor- 
ship and  parochial  conduct  the  most,  do  not,  in 
general,  know^  anything  about  it.  It  deserves 
popularization  by  study  and  experiment. 

There  remain  two  jjoints,  one  of  particular, 
the  second  of  general  bearing  in  the  ceremonial 
question,  which  need  clearing  up.  The  first  is 
that  the  Dearmer  system  of  ecclesiastical  effi- 
ciency is  too  elaborate  for  practical  use.  This 
is  an  erroneous  view.  It  rests  upon  the  fact 
that  Dr.  Dearmer  has  collected  ancl  made  avail- 
able so  vast  an  amount  of  material  that  it  could 
not,  possibly,  be  used  all  together  at  one  time 
and  in  one  place.  But  Dr.  Dearmer  points  this 
out  himself  in  the  introduction  to  "The  Par- 
son's Handbook."    He  mentions  the  wealth  of 


CEREMONIAL  103 

material,  and  speaks  clearly  about  how  to  use 
from  it  what  is  needed  in  any  particular  place. 
The  second  point  concerns  the  common  mis- 
understanding of  what  is  meant  by  the  term: 
"Western  Use."  In  its  large  sense,  this  ex- 
pression may  be  taken  to  mean  the  general  line 
of  development  taken  in  the  ecclesiastical  West, 
and  as  distinct  from  ''Eastern  Use."  In  this 
sense,  the  term  "Western  Use"  would  include 
all  the  various  ceremonial  uses  of  the  West,  and 
vary  internally  in  point  of  periodic  develop- 
ment, as  well  as  in  the  details  of  the  various 
minor  differences  national  and  otherwise;  and, 
in  this  light,  "Dearmerism"  would  be  a  "West- 
ern Use"  equally  with  the  strict  Modern  Roman 
use,  and  the  use  in  general  practice  among 
"High  Church  Anglicans."  But  in  its  stricter 
meaning,  the  term  has  an  entirely  different  con- 
notation. Too  often  it  is  spoken  of  as  though 
there  were  only  one  "Western  Use"  and  that 
the  Modern  Roman.  There  are,  of  course,  at 
least  two  "Western  Uses"  in  this  sense  of  the 
term,  one  being  the  use  of  the  Anglican  Book 
of  Common  Prayer.  But  it  should  be  under- 
stood that  not  only  is  the  term  "Western  Use" 
incorrectly  used  as  an  euphemistic  synonpn  for 
the  Modern  Roman,  but  that  there  are  numer- 
ous other  Roman  uses  besides  the  one  that 
those  who  favor  this  term  have  in  mind.  In 
fact,  in  order  to  witness  what  is  commonly 
meant  by  "Western  Use"  in  the  Roman  Cath- 
olic Communion  itself,  one  m.ust  go  to  the 
Churches  of  the  Jesuits,  Redemptorists,  or  Ora- 
torians;  to  certain  of  the  newer  Churches  in 
France;  to  parish  Churches  in  Rome  and  cer- 


104   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

tain  other  towns  and  cities  in  Italy,  Germany 
and  Austria,  or  to  the  Churches  in  England  and 
the  United  States.  Even  within  the  compara- 
tively narrow  field  of  the  strictly  modern,  official 
usage  of  the  Roman  Church,  there  will  be  found 
two  distinct  kinds  of  ceremonial:  that  of  the 
popular  types  of  Churches  just  indicated;  and 
the  more  restrained  usage  of  the  greater  Ro- 
man basilican  Churches.* 

Then,  besides  the  strictly  modern  Roman 
Rite,  and  in  addition  to  the  Book  of  Common 
Prayer,  there  are  in  current  use  in  the  West 
several  other  rites,  and  these  not  the  least  cor- 
rect and  desirable  on  their  intrinsic  merits. 
Thus,  throughout  the  great  Archdiocese  of  Mi- 
lan, and  even  beyond  its  borders,  the  ancient 
Ambrosian  Rite  serves  more  than  a  million 
souls.  In  the  great  diocese  of  Lyons,  the  Lyons 
Rite  continues  to  be  used.  In  certain  places  in 
Spain  the  Mozarabic  Rite  is  still  current.  In 
Portugal  (on  hearsay)  the  Rite  of  Braga  is  still 
used.  The  older  orders,  Carthusian,  Domini- 
can, and  Cistercian,  all  use  their  proper  rites. 
There  remain,  then,  not  only  the  various  cere- 
monial systems  which  accompany  these  rites, 
but  there  are  more  than  these  in  the  heart  of 
the  Papal  obedience.  In  Spain,  despite  the 
modernized  text  of  the  service  books,  the  old 
Spanish  ceremonial  remains  in  use  to  so  wide 
an  extent  as  to  justify  the  guess  that  it  is  some- 
what better  known  and  more  familiar  to  clergy 
and  people  than  the  official  Modern  Roman  use. 


*  Vid.,  e.  g.,  Modern  Western  Use,  F.  C.  Eeles,  in  Alcuin 
Club  Collections,  No.  XIX,  p.  25.— A.  R.  Mowbray  &  Co. 


CEREMONIAL  105 

This  Spanish  ceremonial,  like  that  accompany- 
ing the  Dominican,  Carthusian,  and  Amobro- 
sian  Rites,  is  curiously  like  the  classical  Angli- 
can Use  as  set  forth  by  Dr.  Dearmer.  Two 
women,  one  a  Swedish  Lutheran,  the  other  a 
Czecho-Slovakian  Roman  Catholic,  once  told 
the  writer,  without  collusion,  and  within  a  week 
of  each  other,  that  the  services  conducted  in  a 
' '  Dearmerite "  parish  in  the  United  States  so 
closely  approximated  their  own  services  as  to 
be  almost  indistinguishable  from  them  to  the 
worshipper. 

Local  uses  also  remain  in  Venice,  in  parts  of 
Germany  and  Austria,  in  a  number  of  French 
Churches,  and  in  Belguim.  These  are  all  **  liv- 
ing" uses,  and  it  may  be  said  that  an  under- 
standing of  the  diversities  of  usage  under  the 
Papal  obedience,  which  the  survival  and  even 
the  popularity  of  these  various  uses  clearly  in- 
dicate, ought  to  do  something  towards  dissi- 
pating the  intellectual  mirage  of  Roman  uni- 
formity which  has  deceived  so  many  dissatisfied 
Anglicans. 

Such,  a  view  of  modern  Roman  practice  in  the 
conduct  of  public  worship  might  also  do  another 
thing.  It  might,  when  made  in  its  proper  set- 
ting— in  a  parish  Church  wherein  is  revealed 
the  craftsmanship  of  the  machine  embroiderer, 
the  tinsmith,  the  housepainter,  and  the  artful 
worker  in  plaster  images — also  do  something 
towards  demonstrating  how  much  better  Angli- 
cans manage  such  things  than  Romans,  at  least 
in  this  country.  The  ''High  Anglican"  Church 
is  the  school,  par  excellence,  for  the  artistically 
aspiring  Roman  Master  of  Ceremonies,  who  un- 


106        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

doubtedly  goes  away  from  an  Anglican  High 
Mass  in  despair,  greatly  edified! 

With  respect  to  what  has  been  alluded  to  as 
the  strictly  Modern  Roman,  official  usage,  which 
is  due  to  Pius  IX,  this  much  may  be  said :  Pius 
IX  was  a  person  of  isms,  and  his  chief  ism  was 
ultramontanism.  His  panacea  was  the  institu- 
tion of  a  rigid,  external  uniformity  in  the 
Churches  which  acknowledged  his  sway.  It  was 
the  applicalion  of  this  panacea  which  introduced 
to  the  Roman  Catholic  w^orld  the  enforcement 
of  the  modern,  official,  Roman  usage.  Pius  IX 
had  a  powerful  grip  upon  the  Church  in  France. 
He  was  able  to  impose  his  will  in  this  matter 
upon  certain  Churches  and  orders,  but  unable 
to  force  the  hand  of  those  above  noted  as  still 
carrying  on  their  traditional  rites  and  the  cere- 
monial proper  to  these.  In  France  he  managed 
to  destroy  the  diocesan  uses,  almost  entirely, 
and  the  French  Church  has  been  neither  health- 
ier nor  happier  since.  The  theological  learn- 
ing of  this  Church  is  no  longer  pre-eminent 
and  of  w^orld-wide  renown.  Individuality  has 
been  crowded  out  of  the  French  Church,  and 
the  irrepressible  national  feeling  of  the  people, 
turned  out  of  its  normal  ecclesiastical  channel 
for  self-expression,  found  an  outlet  in  the  bitter 
attacks  upon  religion  which  resulted  in  the  Con- 
tinental Modernism  so  oppressive  to  the  souls 
of  the  later  popes. 

With  such  an  example  in  mind  it  is  not  hard 
to  see  how  very  disastrous  insistence  upon  a 
rigid  uniformity  might  become.  But,  bad  as 
that  is,  it  can  hardly  be  much  worse  than  the 
intrenched  deprecation  of  uniformity  which  in 


CEREMONIAL  107 

certain  Anglican  circles  regards  almost  any 
suggestion  to  improve  upon  the  current  state 
of  ceremonial  confusion  as  a  calamity!  The 
accepted  Catholic  type  of  ceremonial  in  An- 
glicanism is  sufficiently  well  established  and 
elastic  and  uniform  to  need  no  word  of  com- 
mendation here.  But  those  who  are  unacquaint- 
ed with  the  necessary  technicalities  of  this  im- 
portant subject,  and  who  nevertheless  realize 
the  reverential,  didactic,  and  strategic  import- 
ance of  proper  ceremonial,  and  who  are  unwill- 
ing for  whatever  reason  to  take  up  that  which 
is  currently  accepted  as  the  Anglican  norm, 
might  do  much  worse  than  to  turn  to  the 
Dearmer  directions  for  the  fulfilling  of  their 
need. 


vni 

Work  Among  Foreigners 

No  Churchman  can  fail  in  these  days  to  be 
enormously  interested  in  the  question  of  how 
the  Church  to  which  we  owe  our  allegiance  shall 
meet  the  problem  which  the  great  influx  of  for- 
eigners into  the  United  States  has  brought  be- 
fore us.  In  more  than  one  way  this  is  th& 
Church  problem  of  the  day.  Many  othQr  ques- 
tions must  be  faced  and  are  being  faced  with 
varying  degrees  of  success,  but  this  is  a  pecu- 
liarly insistent  one.  The  question  is  no  longer : 
*' Shall  we  do  sometliing  for  the  foreigners?" 
Rather  it  takes  the  more  advanced  form : ' '  How 
shall  we  take  care  of  the  foreigners!"  Statis- 
tics, especially  in  New  England,  show  a  ratio 
of  increase  which  is  startling  when  examined 
for  the  first  time.  New  England  has  already 
become  New  Europe,  and  the  rest  of  the  country 
is  not  far  behind.  Indifference  to  the  problem 
is  suicidal. 

In  actual  personal  dealing  with  the  foreign 
element  in  any  parish,  a  task  which  is  still  to 
be  begun  by  many,  and  which  is  shrunk  from 
because  it  appears  new  and  strange  and  un- 
familiar, a  great  deal  of  unnecessary  panic  can 
be  saved  if  the  uncertain  parson  or  Church 
worker  will  remember  how  rapidly  foreigners' 
children  become  Americanized.     One  has  only 

108 


WORK  AMONG  FOBEIGNERS       109 

to  look  about  to  see  the  children  and  grand- 
children of  uncouth  peasants  newly  landed 
twenty  to  thirty  years  ago,  taking  prizes  in  high 
school,  delivering  one 's  groceries,  playing  half- 
back on  the  local  college  eleven,  or  ringing  up 
fares  on  the  trolley.  "Foreign "-named  good 
Americans  are  thick  on  the  country's  honor  rolls. 
The  difficulty  of  approach  is  greatly  exagger- 
ated in  many  minds,  just  as  the  difficulties  of  a 
missionary's  approach  to  feathered  savages 
which  characterized  one's  adolescent  concep- 
tion of  that  problem,  lingers,  it  may  be,  up  to 
the  very  point  of  making  such  an  approach 
oneself — through  the  medium  of  a  matter  of 
fact  Mission  Board  and  under  actual  circum- 
stances almost  humdrum. 

True,  it  requires  of  a  certain  kind  of  man  a 
certain  kind  of  courage  to  "go  down  into ' '  the 
polyglot  foreign  quarter  of  a  moderate  sized 
city  and  make  converts,  but  the  actual  work 
of  fitting  foreigners  into  the  mould  of  the 
Church  usually  works  out  as  a  less  direct  and 
less  distracting  task.  Two  points  must  be  kept 
in  mind  by  the  priest  who  would  do  his  duty  by 
a  community  in  his  pastoral  charge  in  which 
there  are  foreigners  to  reach.  These  two  con- 
siderations tend  to  neutralize  each  other,  and 
call  for  a  sense  of  balance  in  dealing  with  peo- 
ple of  alien  traditions.  First,  the  foreigner  of 
any  racial  stripe  possesses  certain  traditional 
characteristics  which  should  be  understood  as 
well  as  possible  by  the  person  who  desires  to 
win  him  for  God  and  the  Church.  Thus,  Italians 
do  not  like  men,  even  priests  (some  of  them 
will  lay  especial  emphasis  on  priests  in  this  con- 


no        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

nection),  to  call  upon  their  womenfolk  in  their 
absence.  Syrians  expect  to  extend  a  kind  of 
oriental  courtesy  which  is  more  or  less  elaborate, 
and  very  apt  to  be  almost  ritualistic,  and  they 
expect  reciprocation.  The  honored  guest  in  a 
Syrian  abode  must  play  the  game.  Bohemians, 
especially  in  country  places,  are  suspicious  of 
strangers  who  make  free  with  short  cuts  over 
the  precious,  fenced-in  land.  Racial  character- 
istics, broadly  speaking,  must  be  more  or  less 
understood,  and  the  pastor  who  would  not  block 
his  own  Avay  to  the  regard  of  these  people  as 
he  goes  in  quest  of  wandering  sheep  for  God's 
fold,  must  have  a  sympathetic  understanding. 

Secondly,  foreigners,  so  to  speak,  do  not  want 
to  be  treated  as  foreigners.  Racial  peculiarities 
apart,  they  feel  instinctively  that  they  are  at 
least  beginning  to  be  Americans  when  once  they 
have  broken  the  national  tie  and  ventured  out 
into  the  land  of  promise.  They  even  frequently 
have  managed  to  acquire  exaggerated  or  dis- 
torted ideas  of  American  freedom  and  equality, 
and  they  resent,  sometimes  almost  subcon- 
sciously, being  regarded  as  alien  to  the  thought 
and  custom  of  their  adopted  land. 

Between  this  Scylla  and  Charybdis  the  per- 
son who  aspires  to  do  "work  among  foreign- 
ers" must  steer  his  course.  The  ice  of  first 
acquaintance  being  once  broken,  his  task  is 
easier,  for  he  will,  if  he  be  interested  and  in- 
telligent, rapidly  acquire  necessary  knowledge 
of  national  or  racial  characteristics  by  actual 
experience,  and  at  the  same  time  he  will  be 
building  up  his  friendship  with  his  new  acquain- 
tances and  convincing  them,  if  he  is  wise,  that 


WORK  AMONG  FOREIGNERS       111 

he  regards  them  precisely  as  he  does  any  other 
friends  or  parishioners. 

The  Church,  when  adequately  presented,  nat- 
urally attracts  foreigners,  because  the  prepon- 
derating majority  of  Christian  foreigners  are 
of  either  the  Catholic  or  the  Lutheran  tradition, 
and  to  both  these  groups  the  Church  makes 
a  natural  appeal.  Her  ordered  service  and 
liturgical  spirit  appeals  to  the  Lutheran,  while 
to  the  foreigner  of  Catholic  tradition  who  has 
iiot  made  connection  with  the  Roman  Catholic 
parish  in  his  new  home,  there  is  much,  if  not 
everything,  of  the  very  best  in  his  own  churchly 
knowledge,  ready  for  him  to  enter  into  and 
worship  with  and  live  by. 

It  would  appear  that  some  of  the  methods 
of  approach  which  seem  to  appeal  to  many 
who  are  interested  in  how  to  meet  the  problem 
made  by  the  presence  of  foreigners  are  hope- 
lessly inadequate.  Chief  among  these  is  the 
naked  idea  of  '* social  service."  It  is  argued, 
of  course,  that  social  service  work  among  for- 
eigners is  excellent  as  a  means  of  approach,  a 
good  strategic  movement  of  the  Church  to  at- 
tract those  of  foreign  birth  or  the  children  of 
such  persons,  and  that,  having  attracted  them, 
the  next  step  is  to  bring  them  into  the  Church 
on  the  basis  of  aroused  interest  in  the  organiza- 
tion wdiich  has  been  doing  for  them  what  it 
could  in  the  way  of  supplying  amusement  and 
instruction,  and  with  all  the  force  of  the  confi- 
dence inspired  in  them  through  the  interest  dis- 
played in  their  welfare.  But  here  again  it  must 
be  kept  in  mind  that  foreigners  not  only  possess 
distinctive  characteristics  but  also  that  they 


112   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

rapidly  acquire  the  American  point  of  view. 
In  the  winter  of  1914-1915  the  writer  attended 
a  conference  of  Churchmen,  chiefly  clergy,  at 
which  work  among  foreigners  was  authorita- 
tively discussed,  and  in  particular  had  im- 
pressed upon  him  the  statements  of  two  rectors 
of  parishes  in  large  cities,  each  of  whom  had 
studied  and  worked  over  the  foreign  problem 
for  many  years.  One  of  these  clergymen  has 
made  a  conspicuous  success  of  his  work  among 
foreigners,  the  other  has  largely  failed  in  his. 
The  clergyman  who  has  been  pre-eminently  suc- 
cessful approaches  all  his  work  from  the  Cath- 
olic point  of  view.  His  panacea  in  dealing  with 
foreigners  was  revealed  at  the  meeting.  He 
said  that,  making  reasonable  allowance  for 
racial  characteristics,  he  aimed  to  treat  all  his 
foreign-born  parishioners  exactly  as  he  would 
treat  anyone  else.  The  other  clergyman,  a 
'* modernist"  of  pronounced  tendencies,  said 
that  he  pinned  his  faith  to  social  service  and 
exact  study  of  the  racial  characteristics,  and 
of  these  he  enumerated  a  remarkably  well  pre- 
pared list.  He  paid  special  attention  to  the 
Italians  among  whom  much  of  his  foreign  work 
was  being  done,  and  if  he  had  considered  that 
his  pro  and  con  list  of  Italian  characteristics 
was  exhaustive,  he  came  very  near  the  truth 
in  that  supposition.  He  analyzed  the  Southern 
European  character  in  masterly  fashion,  but 
in  spite  of  this  he  concluded  his  address  with 
an  expression  of  regret  that  after  so  much  care- 
fully planned  work,  he  must  admit  that  very 
little  had  been  accomplished.  The  one  point 
which  he  left  out  of  consideration  was  that  the 


WORK  AMONG  FOREIGNERS       113 

people  with  whom  he  was  trying  to  work  have 
had  a  continuous  tradition  of  Catholicism  for 
almost  exactly  nineteen  hundred  years. 

When  the  social  service  efforts  of  an  organ- 
ization interested  in  foreigners — and  especially 
in  those  of  the  Catholic  tradition,  as  Italians — 
are  understood  by  the  beneficiaries  to  proceed 
from  a  religious  society  of  Protestants,  it  is 
inevitable  that  their  suspicions  should  be 
aroused;  and  wdien  that  organization  is  the 
Church,  allowing  the  beneficiaries  to  suspect 
a  Protestant  source  of  activity  is  only  the  plac- 
ing of  a  rather  unnecessary  and  very  difficult 
stumbling  block  in  the  way  of  conversion,  which 
is  the  chief,  if  not  the  sole  legitimate  end  of  the 
preliminary  work  of  such  social  service. 

Here  then,  appears  a  means  for  dealing  with 
foreigners  of  the  quantitatively  overwhelming 
Catholic  tradition  which  in  reason  and  because 
of  common  sense  and  practicality  if  for  no 
other  motives,  should  not  be  neglected.  If  the 
catholicity  of  the  Church  means  anything,  it 
means  that  the  Church  is  an  R\]-inclusive  organ- 
ism. That  it  is  not  aW-including  can  hardly 
be  questioned.  If  the  catholicity  of  the  Church 
— as  the  writer  has  heard  more  than  one,  even 
of  the  clergy,  assert — means  that  it  is  all-includ- 
ing, then  there  is  not,  and  never  has  been,  a 
Catholic  Church.  Nor  indeed  will  there  ever 
be  a  Catholic  Church  Militant  until  every  human 
being  alive  on  earth  shall  have  been  numbered 
among  those  who  have  accepted  the  faith  and 
been  baptized  into  it.  That  the  Church,  how- 
ever, is  Catholic  because  all-inclusive  is  a 
position  it  has  maintained  since  St.  Paul  settled 


114   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

that  question  and  made  it  clear  that  all  persons 
without  distinction  of  race  might  accept  Christ 
as  their  Saviour  and  be  baptized.  The  Church 
is  Catholic  therefore  on  the  broadest  basis 
because  it  teaches  all  truth  and  is  by  its  very 
nature  capable  of  taking  into  itself  all  kinds  of 
people,  black,  white,  and  yellow,  red  and  brown, 
high  and  low,  wheat  and  tares ;  and  its  task  is 
to  mould  these  people  into  men  and  women 
acceptable  in  the  sight  of  God,  to  feed  their 
souls,  and  to  make  them  capable  of  working  out 
their  destiny  of  ultimate  union  with  God. 

If  the  Anglican  Communion  is  nothing  more 
than  a  rather  unwieldly  Protestant  denomina- 
tion, it  is  difficult  to  see  why  it  should  continue 
its  existence  at  all,  because  on  all  sides  of  it 
and  in  many  dresses  there  are  religious  bodies 
very  much  more  truly  representative  of  the 
general  principles  of  Protestantism.  And  that 
Avork  on  a  Protestant  basis  among  foreigners 
who  have  the  Catholic  tradition  brings  out  in 
them  their  worst  characteristics  is  reasonably 
obvious  to  all  who  will  examine  such  work. 
To  be  more  specific,  the  foreigner  with  such 
tradition  in  his  blood  and  bones,  who  is,  along 
with  this  good  tradition,  racially  endowed  with 
the  instincts  of  Machiavelli — ready  to  lie,  will- 
ing to  acquire  what  he  can  get  his  hands  on, 
suspicious ,  trained  in  duplicity — views  that 
wdiich  names  itself  ''Protestant"  as  a  thing  in 
which  he  has,  naturally,  neither  part  nor  lot, 
and  inevitably  he  simply  takes  what  is  offered 
in  the  way  of  material  advantages,  but  normally 
goes  no  farther. 

Nowhere  in  the  modern  world,  recent  history 


WOKK  AMONG  FOEEIGNERS       115 

gives  clearest  evidence,  is  there  more  pro- 
nounced hostility  to  papal  absolutism  than 
among  the  Italian  people  themselves.  Great 
numbers  of  these  people  live  at  our  very  doors, 
to  all  intents  and  purposes  unchurched.  The 
wretched  history  of  Roman  tyranny  in  modern 
times  is  the  life  history  of  these  Italians.  All 
iof  them  know  this  history  because  they  are  part 
of  it.  Many  of  them  are  intelligent  and  even 
intellectual.  They  know  about  Minocchi,  for 
example,  and  why  he  left  the  Church.  They 
know  how  the  modernists  of  the  city  of  Rome 
felt  when  they  turned  with  acclamation  to  their 
Jewish  mayor  with  an  address  of  congratula- 
ion  after  his  anti-clerical  speech  of  September 
20,  1910.  Some  of  them  have  read  the  words 
of  that  address,  where  it  said:  *'The  Vatican, 
which  has  stifled  .  .  .  Christianity,  has  no 
right  to  speak  in  the  name  of  the  Church, 
because  the  best  part  of  the  Church  in  Italy  has 
no  wish  to  co-operate  in  the  papal  program. ' '  * 
These  people  look  upon  the  political  papacy 
and  the  curial  autocracy  as  subversive  of  liber- 
ty, enlightenment,  and  religion.  But  they  love 
the  Church.  They  are,  above  all  things.  Cath- 
olics; beyond  all  things  they  fear  and  dislike 
Protestantism.  And  when  anyone,  however 
desirous  of  holding  out  the  hand  of  Christian 
fellowship  to  these  childern  of  an  ancient  civili- 
zation who  flock  to  our  hills  and  farms  and 
factory  towns  and  great  cities,  goes  to  them  in 
the  name  of  the  despised  Protestant  religion, 

*  Quoted  by  Sullivan  in  his  Letters  of  a  Modernist,  to 
His  Holiness,  Pius  X. 


116   THE  GAEDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

he  commits  a  strategic  blunder  the  consequences 
of  which  are  so  far-reaching  as  to  bring  tears 
to  the  eyes  of  anyone  who  knows  even  a  little 
of  this  fundamental  trait  of  the  Italian. 

The  opportunity  of  the  Anglican  Church  in 
America  for  work  among  foreigners  is  unique. 
And  the  factor  which  makes  it  unique  is  that 
we  possess  something  which  we  can  present 
which  meets  with  acceptance,  where  tried,  at 
face  value,  other  things  being  equal.  This 
something  is  a  Catholic  Church,  Catholic  funda- 
mentally, Catholic  in  theology,  in  doctrine,  in 
everything  in  fact,  except,  as  in  many  instances, 
the  outward  and  visible  signs  of  the  catholicity 
inherent  in  it.  It  is,  so  to  speak,  "just  what 
foreigners  want,"  but  they  cannot,  in  the  nature 
of  tilings,  know  tliis  unless  they  are  shown  it 
clearly,  unmistakably.  And  they  cannot  be 
shown  by  means  of  social  service  alone,  however 
well  meant,  nor  by  the  outward  appearance  and 
terminology  of  Protestantism. 

It  is  high  time  that  we  realized  two  things: 
first,  that  most  of  the  people  we  have  to  deal 
with  as  new  citizens  and  as  prospective  Church- 
men— our  future  source  of  supply  in  many  and 
widespread  centers  of  population — are  not 
seeking  in  the  Anglican  Church  for  an  attract- 
ive Protestantism,  but  rather  for  something 
which  is  truly  Catholic  within  and  without ;  but 
not  of  the  papal  obedience,  dominated  by  a 
crafty  hegemony  and  largely  devoted  to  exploi- 
tation ;  and  that  if  such  a  Church  as  they  desire 
is  offered  to  them  they  will  normally  be  eager 
to  grasp  what  is  offered.  Secondly  we  would 
do  well  to  realize,  especially  in  our  work  among 


WORK  AMONG  FOREIGNERS       117 

the  foreign-born  and  their  descendants,  that 
the  practice  of  a  timid  moderation  which  has 
held  us  back,  corporately,  ought  to  be  dropped 
once  for  all.  This  policy  has  kept  us  back  from 
our  normal  expansion;  it  lays  us  open  to  the 
imputation  of  ''Anglican  pusillanimity"  which 
our  religious  neighbors  are  not  slow  to  bestow ; 
it  has  kept  us  from  openly  and  honestly  pro- 
claiming ourselves  for  what  we  are — not  a  hy- 
brid, a  hodge-podge  of  conflicting  views  which 
will  not  even  emulsify  into  a  reasonable  com- 
prehensiveness— ^but  as  what  we  know  ourselves 
to  be,  God's  Catholic  Church  for  the  English- 
speaking  peoples.  When  we  do  that  corporate- 
ly, we  cannot  keep  ourselves  from  growing  rap- 
idly into  a  position  of  commanding  respect  and 
influence,  and  we  shall  not  totter  along  on  our 
tracks.  The  way  to  accomplish  this  corporate 
desideratum  is  to  assert  it;  and  so  we  shall, 
God  grant,  lead  these  brothers  from  beyond  the 
seas  out  of  their  muddle  of  papal  obscurantism 
into  the  clear  light  of  God's  truth,  the  truth 
of  the  Catholic  Church  of  these  United  States, 
the  land  of  promise  and  of  hope. 


IX 

The  Implications  of  an  Ancient  Rhyme 

There  is  always  a  certain  element  of  truth  in 
proverbs  or  similar  sayings  because  these  are 
statements  of  crystallized  opinion,  and  an  opin- 
ion held  so  widely  as  to  result  in  a  proverb 
is  extremely  likely  to  be  near  the  centre  of 
things.  Such  a  statement  is  that  rather  thin, 
doggerel  triplet  wliich  attempts  to  summarize 
the  characteristics  of  the  three  Anglican  schools 
of  churchmanship : 

''High  and  Crazy; 
Low  and  lazy; 
Broad  and  hazy. ' ' 

That  brilliant  oddity,  Ronald  A.  Hilary  Knox, 
ex-priest  of  the  Church  of  England,  and  now 
of  the  papal  obedience,  in  an  article  written 
for  the  Dnblin  Revieiv  shortly  after  his  seces- 
sion, in  the  summer  of  1918,  pointed  out  that 
there  are,  actually,  no  less  than  seven  varieties 
of  Anglican  churchmanship.  As  we  gaze  about 
us  and  take  thought,  we  can  hardly  help  finding 
that  Knox  erred  on  the  side  of  conservatism. 
We  wonder  why,  if  he  were  going  to  apply  his 
firework  mind  to  a  critical  summarizing  of  the 
Anglican  schools  of  thought,  he  should  have 
stopped  at  expanding  the  traditional  number 

118 


IMPLICATIONS  OF  A  RHYME       119 

three  into  the  mj^stical  number  seven.  "VVe  can- 
not help  thinking  that  such  limitation  is  alto- 
gether too  conservative;  but  healthful  reaction 
brings  us,  like  a  bee  to  the  landing-board,  to 
the  conclusion  that,  generally  speaking  there 
are  three,  and  just  three  such  schools,  and  that 
the  triplet  lines  ending  in  ''azy"  describe  them 
pretty  well.  Really  deep  thought  will  be  likely 
to  confirm  this  view. 

Now  there  are  certain  dangers  in  telling  the 
naked  truth,  as  everyone  knoAvs.  And  these 
dangers  are  not  limited  to  the  social  errors 
involved,  nor  to  the  apparent  absurdities  which 
this  unfortunate  habit  so  frequently  lands  one 
in.  There  are  the  subtler  dangers,  such  as  are 
being  so  constantly  braved  b}^  an  incurable 
truth-teller  like  Mr.  Chesterton:  the  danger  of 
being  thought  a  purveyor  of  comic  articles ;  the 
danger  of  not  being  taken  seriously ;  the  danger 
of  being  considered  insincere ;  the  great  danger 
of  degenerating  in  the  public  mind,  into  a  dealer 
in  paradoxes,  for  it  is  not  until  one  gets  down 
to  an  apparent  contradiction  (as  that  great 
teacher  Brooke  Foss  Wiestcott  used  to  warn  his 
pupils),  that  you  can  be  reasonably  certain  of 
being  on  the  right  track. 

Even  a  clever  essayist  like  Mr.  Chesterton 
loses  heavily  because  the  reading  public — even 
essay  readers — can  be  quite  readily  shocked  and 
surprised  by  the  appearance  of  naked  truth. 
Therefore  a  clumsy  person  must  make  his  at- 
tempt at  telling  the  truth  with  a  foregone  cer- 
tainty that  his  excursion  into  that  fantastic 
realm  where  things  are  stated  as  they  are,  will 
be  over  a  stonv  road. 


120   THE  GAEDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

It  seems  to  the  writer  that  the  words  crazy, 
lazy,  and  hazy  do  pretty  well  describe  the  in- 
ternal situation  with  which  we  have  to  deal 
in  that  portion  of  the  Holy  Catholic  Church 
legally  described  as  the  Protestant  Episcopal 
Church  in  the  United  States  of  America.  Prob- 
ably everyone  who  has  ever  heard  this  simple 
rlijTne  was  at  once  impressed  with  the  fact  that 
it  did  describe  the  three  kinds  of  churchman- 
ship.  Probably  every  reader  will  agree  with 
the  writer  that  the  author  of  this  jingle  was  a 
person  of  insight  who  knew  what  was  apt  and 
what  was  meet.  So  far,  good.  But  to  look 
ahead  and  face  the  results  of  applying  these 
tests  of  character,  crazy,  lazy,  and  hazy,  in  a 
serious  and  truthful  way — ah!  that  is  a  horse 
of  another  color. 

We  begin,  then,  with  the  high  and  crazy. 
Crazy  here,  obviously  means  not  so  much  lop- 
sided, as  in  ''crazy  quilt,"  or  as  the  word  would 
be  applied  to  a  scarecrow  with  its  inherent  lack 
of  symmetry,  or  to  a  very  old  house  which  has 
wilted  and  fallen  out  of  plumb  so  as  to  present 
many  irregular  angularities,  as  it  does  dement- 
ed, possessed,  queer  in  the  head.  The  plain  in- 
tention of  the  author  of  the  line  of  verse  is  that 
High  churclimen  are  not  queer  in  their  angles 
or  physical  postures,  but  queer  in  their  rela- 
tion to  what  approximated  the  established  order 
in  the  days  when  these  lines  were  given  to  the 
world.  In  other  words,  a  High  churchman  is  a 
kind  of  fanatic.  This  is  true,  and  may  all  who 
are  denominated  High  thank  God  devoutly  for 
it !  The  High  churchman  is,  plainly,  a  different 
kind  of  churchman  from  his  lazy  and  hazy  fel- 


IMPLICATIONS  OF  A  EHYME       121 

low  Anglicans.  He  goes  at  the  things  concerned 
in  churchmanship — his  worship  particularly — 
in  a  manner  which  is  unusual  and  hence  comic. 
Therefore  he  is  crazy.  He  does  not  jog  along 
in  the  cut-and-dried,  traditional  Anglicanism  of 
the  eighteenth  century;  he  desires  a  restoration 
to  the  activities  and  practices  of  an  era  which 
was  not  cut-and-dried,  and  as  this  appears  new 
and  strange,  the  High  churchman,  who  for  some 
inexplicable  reason  likes  it  that  way,  is  crazy. 
He  rakes  up  a  number  of  usages  which  it  would 
be  much  less  trouble  to  let  alone,  and  when  he 
has  them  resurrected  and  in  working  order 
they  resemble  somewhat,  on  the  surface,  the 
outward  and  visible  performances  of  those  ir- 
rational and  inexplicable  Romanists,  and  clear- 
ly he  is  crazy.  He  breaks  away  from  the  wor- 
ship of  a  comfortable,  good-natured  deity,  who 
has  grown  rather  sleepy,  and  who  is  perfectly 
satisfied,  of  course,  with  the  old  cut-and-dried 
mumble  of  services,  and  the  old,  easy-going 
semi-disregard  of  himself,  and  the  entirely  cut- 
and-dried,  respectable,  middle-class  lives  of  his 
mundane  adherents ;  all  of  which  is  a  great  deal 
of  trouble  and  quite  unnecessary;  and  so  the 
High  churchman  is  crazy.  He  substitutes  a 
quite  different  God  as  the  object  of  his  worship, 
he  frames  his  life  upon  the  principle  of  union 
with  Him,  he  is  abundantly  careful  to  do  Him 
honor  by  frequent,  elaborate,  and  appropriate 
services,  lives  lived  in  a  carefully  preserved 
state  of  grace,  costly  fabrics  and  furniture  as 
well  as  growing  good  taste  in  houses  of  wor- 
ship; he  allies  himself  with  the  long-neglected 


122   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

arts;  he  goes  to  work  for  God — indubitably  lie 
is  crazy  as  he  can  be.    He  is  a  fanatic. 

Now  it  is  just  this  fanaticism  for  God,  like 
Ihat  of  the  "High"  churchman,  that  seems  to 
be  needed.  The  external  evidence  is  that  the 
lazy  and  hazy  metliods  have  failed  every  time 
they  have  been  tried.  As  far  back  as  history 
takes  us,  the  cut-and-dried  methods  of  the  hide- 
bound religionist  like  Seeker  and  the  fanciful 
inadequacies  of  the  inexact  or  semi-believing 
religionist  like  Paul  of  Samosata  have  failed, 
as  indeed  they  deserved  to  fail.  Always  it  is 
the  fanatic  who  succeeds.  David,  Mohammed, 
The  Mahdi,  Dolling,  Savonarola,  Wesley,  Ig- 
natius Loyola,  the  Tai  Ping  group  (not  to  mul- 
tiply instances) — all  these  got  somewhere  in 
and  with  their  religion.  As  soon  as  the  fanati- 
cism of  the  fervent  believer — for  it  is  a  matter 
of  belief — has  evaporated,  then  haziness  or  lazi- 
ness sets  in,  and  there  is  a  let-down,  succeeded 
by  formalism,  professionalism,  decadence — fin- 
ally death,  quiet,  uninteresting,  and  unmourned. 

The  lazy  come  next  under  our  consideration 
for  a  brief  examination.  There  is  no  necessity 
for  a  definition.  Lazy  is  lazy.  But  it  is  pos- 
sible for  a  person  to  be  lazy  in  part  and  in  part 
otherwise.  A  man  may  be  a  lazy  churchman 
and  a  highly  successful  plumber.  Or  he  may 
be,  in  the  case  of  a  minister,  of  the  type  of  the 
Fox-Hunting  Parson  lamented  by  the  late 
James  Anthony  Froude.  It  is  something  like 
the  latter  or  his  more  modern  descendant  that 
was  in  the  mind  of  the  author  of  our  jingle.  He 
must  have  meant  the  kind  of  churchman  who 
cared  so  little  for  his  religion  that  he  contented 


IMPLICATIONS  OF  A  RHYME       123 

himself  with  going  througli  the  motions,  the 
minimum  of  motions.  He  had  in  mind  the  com- 
fortable, socially  presentable,  somewhat  world- 
ly, easy-going  parson;  and  the  comfortable, 
socially  presentable,  somewhat  worldly,  easy- 
going congregation  of  that  parson.  These,  he 
says,  are  the  low. 

It  is  extremely  difficult  to  understand  just 
wliat  the  attraction  can  be  in  this  word  ' '  low. ' ' 
It  were  invidious  to  suggest  comparison  of  the 
connotations  of  this  word,  the  opposite  of 
''high,"  with  the  latter 's  glorious  connotations, 
but  in  "low"  churchmanship  there  is  no  sug- 
gestion of  an  oriflamme,  of  a  standard  raised, 
no  glory,  no  noble  appeal — in  short,  no  rom- 
ance. At  best,  being  "low"  in  churchmanship 
is  a  negative  position,  a  set  of  opinions  calling 
loudly  for  explanations,  for  an  apologetic.  And 
that  apologetic  has  never  been  written.  Save 
for  fulminations  against  the  "high"  based  on 
inconclusive  evidence  that  those  so  denominat- 
ed were  betrajdng  the  Church  over  to  an  alien 
government,  and  hugely  suggestive  of  panic, 
and  a  somewhat  nervous  sense  of  fellowship 
enforced  mth  the  broad  and  hazy,  there  is  no 
appreciable  platform  for  lowness  in  the  Angli- 
can Communion. 

Nevertheless  much  is  to  be  said  for  low  and 
lazy  individuals.  Their  laziness  is  not  always 
of  the  sitting-and-taking-it-easy  kind.  Prob- 
ably the  laziness  of  the  "low"  today  would  bet- 
ter be  described  as  an  unwillingness  to  learn 
liow  to  do  things  for  God,  a  laziness  with  re- 
spect to  methods.  For  the  "low,"  like  the 
' '  high, ' '  are  believers.    So  far  as  their  laziness 


124   THE  GAEDEN  OF  THE  LOED 

is  an  intellectual  quality,  it  consists  in  the  com- 
placency with  which  they  hold  to  the  opinions 
and  convictions  involved  in  the  Christian  Faith, 
and  their  inability  or  unwillingness  to  put  that 
faith  into  practice.  There  is  in  mind  the  case 
of  a  very  prominent  Low  churchman  who  an- 
swered in  the  public  press  some  years  ago  cer- 
tain attacks  upon  the  Anglican  Communion 
which  had  been  given  great  prominence  and 
which  emanated  from  a  foreign  papist  at  large 
in  this  country  and  coruscating  mightily  about 
Henry  VIII,  Anglican  Orders,  and  other  similar 
controversial  matters.  The  reply  was  crushing 
and  effective.  The  learned  papist  was  silenced 
and  well  silenced,  but  to  accomplish  this  desid- 
eratum the  prominent  ^'low"  churchman  had  to 
write  from  the  ''high"  standpoint  throughout 
and  use  "high"  arguments.  This  he  did  with 
commendable  thoroughness,  although  he  had  to 
leave  his  work  on  the  Prayer  Book  Papers  Com- 
mittee to  do  it.  Then  he  went  back  to  his  work 
on  his  Prayer  Book  Papers,  a  series  of  publi- 
cations aimed  against  the  "high"  in  his  own 
communion,  and  based  upon  a  point  of  view 
which  even  the  papist  could  not  have  used  be- 
cause it  would  have  been  inexplicable  to  him 
as  a  man  of  some  learning,  and  doubtless  an 
adequate  knowledge  of  the  Christian  Faith  and 
what  that  involves. 

The  "broad"  and  hazy  have  somewhat  out- 
grown their  haziness.  They  are,  as  it  were,  a 
group  of  persons  going  through  a  fog.  They 
started  from  a  clear  bit  of  weather  into  the  fog ; 
and  were  well  in  when  the  author  of  the  jingle 
described  them.    They  are  emerging  today,  but 


IMPLICATIONS  OF  A  RHYME       125 

they  are  coming  out  on  the  other  side  of  the 
bank  of  fog.  The  Broad  churchman  today  dis- 
likes the  Christian  Religion,  and  seeks  to  sub- 
stitute for  it  something  else  of  his  own  inven- 
tion. The  haziness  which  characterizes  him  to- 
day is  the  haziness  which  grows  out  of  a  lack 
of  partisan  unity,  but  that  haze  too  is  clearing 
off.  The  "broad"  is  getting  quite  clear  in  his 
mind  what  it  is  that  he  wants  to  substitute  for 
the  Christian  Religion.  This  is  a  kind  of  com- 
plex emulsion  which  is  very  pleasant  to  his 
taste.  It  has  no  very  definite  taste,  for  there 
are  too  many  ingredients,  and,  being  an  emul- 
sion, it  has  to  be  constantly  shaken,  lest  it  re- 
solve itself  into  its  elements  again  and  cease  to 
please.  This  shaking  process  keeps  those  called 
"broad"  very  busy  indeed.  The  emulsion  has 
many  ingredients,  each  purporting  to  be  "  Chris- 
tian," and  the  "broad"  wants  to  include  the 
"low"  and  leave  out  the  "high."  He  is  cer- 
tain that  the  traditional  laziness  of  the  one 
will  cause  it  to  emulsify  beautifully,  and  equally 
positive  that  the  craziness  of  the  other  would 
make  lumps  in  his  pleasant  emulsion  which  he 
agitates  so  energetically  and  sniffs  so  agree- 
ably. 

As  in  the  original  little  rhyme,  it  may  easily 
be  seen  that  the  High  and  the  Low  are  contigu- 
ous, and  the  Low  and  the  Broad  are  contiguous. 
Laziness  and  haziness  mingle  more  or  less 
easily,  since  haziness  readily  absorbs  laziness. 
Craziness  and  laziness  do  not  mix  so  easily. 
In  the  nature  of  the  terms,  craziness  must 
dominate  laziness,  because  since  anything  will 
dominate  that  which  is  lazy,  and  as  craziness  is 


126        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

a  very  active  quality,  a  fortiori  laziness,  the  at- 
tribute of  the  "low,"  must  yield.  It  is  an 
axiom.  The  question  which  concerns  all  three 
is:  Shall  the  lazy  yield  to  the  crazy  or  to  the 
hazy!  The  latter  is  a  process  about  which  the 
lazy  need  take  no  thought.  They  can  be  en- 
veloped in  the  haze  of  tliat  emulsion  without 
any  effort,  and  that  way  many  of  them  are 
drifting,  since,  being  lazy,  they  have  little  vital- 
ity by  themselves.  But  the  former  would  be  a 
stimulating  process.  It  is  just  that  element  of 
fanaticism  which  involves  hard  work  and  self- 
sacrifice  which  would  mould  the  easy-going 
"lows"  into  something  with  fibre,  which  Avould 
electrify  a  rather  spineless  school  into  some- 
thing that  God  could  use  and  that  God  would 
want  to  use.  And  it  would  be  too  bad  if  the 
"lows"  should  be  too  lazy  to  see  this  before 
they  are  entirely  absorbed  into  the  emulsion, 
for  those  of  them  who  remain  with  us  believe 
in  the  Christian  Religion  (even  though  they  may 
not  practice  it  all)  just  as  do  the  crazy  and 
just  as  the  hazy  do  not. 

In  one  respect,  it  is  a  very  good  thing  for 
us  Anglicans  that  Pius  IX,  of  fragrant  memory, 
condemned  our  orders  so  emphatically.  For  the 
Roman  controversialist,  quaerens  quern  devoret, 
is  thus  substantially  estopped  from  using  his 
best  argument  against  us,  i.  e.,  that  although 
we  have  all  the  marks  of  a  Catholic  Church, 
we  vitiate  our  position  by  not  putting  these  to 
any  perceptible  use,  or,  rather,  that  we  have  no 
inherent  unity  of  usage  and  conduct.  Of  course, 
if  we  have  no  orders  in  the  Catholic  sense,  we 
have  nothing ;  we  do  not  exist  as  a  Church,  and 


IMPLICATIONS  OF  A  RHYME       127 

the  ground  is  cut  from  under  the  feet  of  the 
Roman  controversialist.  And  this  official  Roman 
view,  the  hazy,  while  professing  to  dislike  Rome 
and  alleging  that  the  crazy  are  Rome's  Anglican 
adherents,  asserts  himself,  specifically,  when- 
ever— and  it  is  often — he  belittles  the  orders 
and  standing  of  his  own  communion  as  a  valid 
part  of  the  Church  Universal.  In  this  view, 
the  lazy,  while  he  is  too  lazy  to  assert  it,  seem- 
ingly acquiesces,  whenever — and  it  is  almost 
always — he  lists  himself  as  indistinguishable 
from  one  of  the  Protestant  Denominations  save 
for  our  incomparable  liturgy ! 

It  remains  for  the  "high" — and  crazy — to 
hold  up  the  standard  of  his  faith;  to  assert,  in 
spite  of  multiform  antagonisms  without  and  in- 
sidious treachery  within,  hazily  originated,  the 
truth  of  his  position  by  his  conduct.  And  be- 
cause he  is  crazy — a  fanatic  for  God,  and  not 
merely  respectable  and  lazy,  or  hazily  machinat- 
ing— ^he  succeeds;  he  grows  like  a  great  tree, 
although  he  was  no  larger  than  the  mustard 
seed  not  so  very  long  ago. 

Is  it  too  much  to  hope  that  overcoming  his 
laziness  and  using  the  faith  that  is  truly  in 
him,  the  ''low"  may  awaken  out  of  his  sleep, 
and,  bestirring  himself  to  gain  that  certain 
fanaticism  which  accomplishes  God's  results, 
escape  the  ultimate  entombment  of  dissolution 
in  a  constantly  agitated  emulsion? 


The  Cheer-Up  Philosophy 

The  writer  is  not  a  socialist  because  he  be- 
lieves that  Christianity — which  is  quite  another 
matter — and  not  socialism  is  the  panacea  for 
the  sufferings  of  the  world.-  But  if  socialism 
had  done  nothing  else  it  would  still  be  worthy 
a  certain  respect  because  it  lias  driven  home  the 
important  truth  that  palliatives  are  useless  be- 
cause they  do  not  go  to  the  roots,  but  rather 
foster  and  abet  the  evils  they  are  meant  to 
alleviate.  Most  of  us  see  to-day  that  the  effect 
of  a  mere  palliative  is  somewhat  akin  to  the 
effect  of  Christian  Science,  which  may  be  said 
to  intensify  the  ravages  of  disease  by  lulling 
the  sufferer  into  the  dangerous  belief  that  as 
there  is  no  disease  there  can  be  no  suffering, 
thereby  affording  the  disease  every  chance  to 
increase  and  consume  the  body. 

It  is  an  attitude  like  this  uncompromising 
one  of  the  socialists  against  all  schemes  which 
will  not  fit  four-square  with  their  own  that  is 
here  set  forth  against  a  prevailing  popular 
philosophy,  a  system  which  expresses  itself  in 
terms  of  the  human  disposition,  a  favorite  sub- 
stitute of  the  "Modernist"  for  orthodox  Chris- 
tianitv  which  he  dislikes — the  philosophy  of 
"Cheer  Up." 

This  philosophy  is  unsound  because  it  is  en- 
128 


THE  CHEER-UP  PHILOSOPHY      129 

tirely  subjective,  ignores  causes,  and  seeks  to 
inspire  an  unreasonable  contentment.  The  ut- 
terances of  its  propagandists  are  like  this: 
"Never  mind  old  man,  keep  on  smiling  even 
though  you  are  getting  the  worst  of  it.  Don't 
commit  the  unforgiveable  sin  of  trying  to 
change  your  luck,  simply  change  yourself  into  a 
smiler.  Concentrate  on  your  frame  of  mind 
and  make  that  cheerful.  Grin  and  bear  it. 
Never  repine.  Smile  through  your  tears!  Of 
course  its  true,  as  you  say,  that  the  girl  who 
pretended  she  cared  for  you  and  played  with 
your  honest  affection  and  allowed  you  to  buy 
her  a  wrist  watch,  has  dropped  you  like  a  hot 
cake  and  is  going  with  George  Brown  now.  But 
that's  all  right.  Never  say  die.  Cheer  up  and 
forget  it!  Don't  get  angry  at  her;  don't  let 
yourself  get  ruffled,  old  fellow.  When  you  see 
her  treat  her  as  though  nothing  had  happened, 
for  if  you  act  as  though  you  cared  you'll  be  a 
Grouch,  and  the  world  hates  a  Grouch.  That 
will  make  lines  in  your  face.  Learn  to  spread 
sunshine,  dear  boy.  Look  on  the  bright  side, 
too.  Just  suppose  you  had  married  her.  She 
might  have  slipped  on  the  front  steps  on  her 
way  from  her  father's  front  hallway  to  the 
nuptial  automobile  and  broken  her  neck,  and 
then  you  ivould  have  had  something  to  worry 
over.  Don 't  let  the  little  things  worry  you.  Re- 
member how  Mrs.  Wiggs  found  cause  for  com- 
fort in  not  having  a  harelip.  Remember  Polly- 
anna  and  her  "glad  game."    Remember — 


130        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

"The  year's  at  the  spring 
And  day's  at  the  morn; 
Morning's  at  seven; 
The  hillside's  dew-pearled 
The  lark's  on  the  wing; 
The  snail's  on  the  thorn; 
God 's  in  his  heaven — 
All 's  right  with  the  world. ' ' 

' '  What  are  you  in  comparison  with  the  whole 
world!  Think  of  that  lark  and  that  snail  that 
meant  so  much  to  Robert  Browning,  and — why, 
why— come,  dear  fellow,  CHEER  UP!" 

"Never  mind  if  your  razor  handle  did  snap 
and  now  you  can't  strop  the  miserable  thing 
because  it  wobbles  sideways!  Shem  didn't 
bother  with  razors  in  the  ark.  I'd  never  let  a 
little  thing  like  a  razor  bother  me." 

"What  difference  does  it  make  if  it  did  rain 
every  day  for  thirty-eight  days  and  now  your 
old  garden  seeds  have  all  rotted  in  the  ground f 
Remember  what  Riley  says : 

'  When  God  sorts  out  the  weather  and  sends  rain 
Wtiy,  rain 's  my  choice. ' 

^^ That's  the  way  to  look  at  it  old  man. 
CHEER  UP!  !  !" 

The  main  trouble  with  these  and  other  simi- 
lar characteristic  provocations  to  manslaughter 
is  that  there  is  no  sympathy  in  them.  Instead 
the  person  who  receives  the  ' '  cheer  up ' '  advice 
is,  in  effect,  told  that  his  grief  or  natural  an- 
noyance is  unimportant ;  and,  since  it  is  to  him 
immediately  and  touchingly  important,  the  ad- 


THE  CHEER-TJP  PHILOSOPHY      131 

vice,  if  he  be  a  simpleton,  simply  stuns  him, 
which  does  no  good ;  or,  if  he  possess  a  mind, 
strikes  him  as  irritating  impertinence.  In 
either  case  it  fails.  Or,  it  may  be,  that  the 
professional  optimist  conveys  the  impression 
that  the  fault  is  with  the  sufferer,  otherwise  it 
couldn't  have  happened.  This  form  of  consola- 
tion probably  antedates  the  author  of  the  Book 
of  Job  by  some  eras.  Job  himself  recalls  to 
mind  an  excellent  example  of  trouble.  One 
suffering  from  a  painful  boil — and  none  of  us 
is  immune — is  not  helped  either  by  being  told 
that  there  are  greater  things  than  boils — which 
only  makes  him  think  of  carbuncles  and  writhe 
harder — or  that  boils  do  not  exist.  He  knows 
better.  He  needs  either  s^nnpathy  or  relief,  that 
is,  either  a  kind  hearted  friend  to  say  *'m-m-m- 
M-M-urrrrph!"  or  a  skilful  surgeon  with  a 
sharp  lancet. 

Professional  optimists,  one  suspects,  are  in- 
sincere. It  is  quite  possible  to  admire  Elizabeth 
Barrett  Browning's  quality  when  she  assures 
us  beautifully  that  she  lost  the  little  cares  that 
fretted  her  ''out  in  the  fields  with  Grod."  But 
it  is  beyond  a  doubt  that  Mrs.  Browning  (a 
rather  sensible  woman),  would  have  had 
thoughts  and  a  facial  expression  like  the  rest  of 
us  if  on  the  way  back  from  the  fields  she  had 
been  obliged  to  drive  a  pair  of  heifers  a  mile 
along  a  road  flanked  with  much  brush  and  many 
gateways.  Or  one  can  quite  safely  predicate 
the  same  imagined  warmth  of  James  Whitcomb 
Riley  or  even  of  that  incurable  optimist  Josh 
Billings  if  one  imagine  either  of  these  worthies 
dropping  the  soap  in  mid  wash  and  having  to 


132   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

fish  it  out,  with  wet  and  grubby  hands,  dusty 
and  nasty  from  under  the  bathtub. 

There  are  worse  things  than  ''grouches" — 
insincerity  for  instance,  or  an  unsympathetic 
disposition.  Even  the  man  with  a  chronic 
grouch  deserves  sympathy.  In  all  human  prob- 
ability he  has  got  that  way  because  someone 
has  done  something  outrageous  to  him,  or  per- 
haps, he  suffers  from  stomach  trouble,  or  in- 
herited it  and  doesn't  know  it  himself.  If  the 
promoters  of  the  Cheer  Up  Philosophy  really 
desire  to  accomplish  something  constructive  and 
useful — they  are  the  kindest  hearted  people  im- 
aginable— they  could  take  courses  in  Sympa- 
thetic Pedagogy  and  offer  sympathy  to  the 
afflicted  and  wholesome  chastisement  to  those 
addicted  to  wronging  their  friends  and  acquain- 
tances— an  enormous  field  of  effort  much  un- 
dermanned. 

The  object  of  these  worthy  people  is  to  pro- 
mote happiness.  The  large  literature  they  have 
produced  witnesses,  if  only  by  its  commercial 
success,  to  the  large  room  for  the  exercise  of 
efforts  in  this  direction.  The  need  for  some- 
thing of  the  kind  is  apparent  to  anyone  who 
possesses  five  or  more  acquaintances.  The  only 
question  has  to  do  with  the  means.  Shall  it  be 
the  long,  hard  process  of  the  Christian  Life  or 
shall  it  be  the  pastoral  theology  of  the  "Mod- 
ernists ' '  which  is  identical  with  the  ' '  Cheer  Up 
Philosophy"!  Recourse  must  be  had  to  some- 
thing. 

The  kind  of  happiness  which  the  * '  red-blood- 
ed, ' '  hearty  variety  of  practising  ' '  Modernists ' ' 
attempt  to  produce  within  their  victims  is  a 


THE  CHEER-UP  PHILOSOPHY      133 

negative  thing,  secured,  if  ever,  by  inducing  a 
mental  state  which  ignores  actual  troubles.  Sin 
is  not  overcome  by  a  fight,  it  is  ignored,  denied. 
Psychologically,  of  course,  this  type  of  happi- 
ness is  only  a  mental  attitude,  a  purely  subjec- 
tive condition.  If  its  end  could  be  universally 
attained  uniformity  of  mental  state  would  make 
it  possible  to  ignore  circumstance  and  people 
would  be  indifferent  to  hunger  and  cold,  pain 
and  grief,  and  all  the  other  evils  which  harrow 
the  souls  of  men,  because  their  souls  would  be 
asleep.  Such  a  state  of  spiritual  coma  would 
bear  the  same  relation  to  normal  human  happi- 
ness that  the  religion  of  Mithra  bears  to  that 
of  Christ.  The  apparatus  would  be  nearly  the 
same,  the  results  might  appear  almost  identical, 
at  least  externally,  but  one  would  have  some- 
thing actual  back  of  it,  while  the  other  rested 
on  a  product  of  human  imagination.  Christ  is 
Real ;  Mithra  is  a  myth. 

Christianity  teaches  that  true  human  happi- 
ness is  to  be  found  in  union  with  God  through 
Jesus  Christ.  This  involves  a  lifelong  struggle 
called  the  Christian  Life,  otherwise  expressed 
as  the  soul's  warfare  w^ith  sin.  Sin,  broadly 
considered,  may  be  defined  as  the  centralizing 
of  the  universe  in  self  and  thinking,  talking, 
and  acting  accordingly.  Such  an  attitude  is 
humanly  natural,  hence  the  specific  doctrine 
called  Original  Sin,  a  perfectly  clear  and  sound 
doctrine  which  has  become  greatly  obscured  by 
the  concentration  of  men's  minds  upon  the 
Hebrew  tale  of  its  origin  by  the  ancestors  of 
the  human  race  in  Eden  which  has  a  religious 
rather  than  an  historical  significance. 


134   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

The  Christian  Life  possesses  the  tremendous 
merit  of  practicability  to  commend  it  to  those 
whose  dispositions  trouble  themselves  and  those 
about  them.  But  the  Christian  Life  is  a  difficult 
process  (called  theologically  the  salvation  of  the 
soul),  like  .every  thing"  else  which  leads  to  a  great 
reward.  The  effort  required  to  liberate  a  soul 
from  its  humanly  inherited  ("original"),  sel- 
fishness, the  turning  of  it  Godward,  and  the 
keeping  of  it  thus  directed,  naturally  and  in- 
evitably involves  the  sweetening  of  the  disposi- 
tion. This  is  another  truth  which  has  been  al- 
lowed to  become  obscure,  and  it  is  rarely 
thought  of  or  is  passed  over  by  the  many  who 
prefer  a  short-cut  to  happiness.  A  person  with 
a  sour  disposition — the  kind  of  person  at  whom 
the  literature  and  exhortations  of  the  "Cheer 
Ups"  is  launched — is  not  living  the  Christian 
Life  or  is  making  a  sorry  failure  of  it.  Saint- 
hood is  the  quality  of  a  Christian,  not  respect- 
ability, not  fastidiousness,  not  merely  such 
things  as  commercial  honesty.  And  the  known 
saints  did  not  and  do  not  have  grouches.  People 
commonly  get  this  fact  confused  with  another 
and  we  have  the  phenomenon  of  professional 
religionists,  saturated  with  bad  theology,  tell- 
ing us  that  Christianity  needs  well  and  happy 
people  to  live  it  and  appreciate  it,  and  the 
logically  associated  phenomenon  of  social  serv- 
ice replacing  the  bread  and  meat  of  the  gospel 
instead  of  occupying  its  true  place  as  a  product 
of  the  digestion  of  that  bread  and  meat. 

If  one  approach  consideration  of  the  * '  Cheer 
Up  Philosophy"  from  the  Christian  point  of 
view,  it  will  be  clear  to  him  how  far  off. the 


THE  CHEER-UP  PHILOSOPHY      135 

track  are  those  who  tell  us  to  cheer  up  in  order 
to  be  happy.  They  have  the  sequence  wrong. 
The  cart  is  set  to  pull  the  horse  and  the  horse 
sleeps  standing.  For  one  does  not  cheer  up 
in  order  to  be  happy.  One  is  cheerful  because 
he  is  happy,  and  the  kind  of  happiness  derived 
from  cheering  up  is  abnormal  and  delusive  be- 
cause it  is  the  result  of  habitual  auto-hypnosis. 

To  people  in  normal  health  on  a  sea  voyage 
a  whiff  of  dinner  cooking  in  the  galley  puts  a 
finishing  touch  on  an  appetite  derived  from  the 
tang  of  salty  breeze  stiffly  blowing.  Not  so  the 
sufferer  from  seasickness.  No  amount  of  Job's 
comfort  avails  to  raise  him  up,  it  even  makes 
him  worse.  His  state  is  the  opposite  of  cheer- 
ful. 

In  mental  disease  it  is  the  same.  Depression 
is  the  most  typical  form  of  mind  sickness.  The 
melancholic  insane  cannot  cheer  up  because  they 
are  not  happy,  and  they  are  not  happy  because 
their  malady  has  destroyed  or  suspended  their 
capacity  for  happiness  by  casting  into  their 
mental  machinery  a  monkey  wrench  of  obses- 
sion. Wise  alienists  charged  with  their  cure  do 
not  merely  attempt  to  cheer  up  their  patients. 
Rather  they  seek  to  remove  the  wrench  from 
the  machinery  and  then  to  patch  up  the  ma- 
chinery. If  this  can  be  done  the  capacity  for 
happiness  resumes  its  function,  and  the  patient, 
restored  to  happiness,  becomes  cheerful. 

The  same  principle  applies  to  sickness  of  the 
soul.  A  person  spiritually  ill,  that  is,  suffering 
from  the  disease  of  sinfulness,  has  no  relish  for 
the  simple  pleasures  in  which  those  enjoying 
spiritual  health  find  delight.    He  loathes  inno- 


136   THE  GAEDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

cent  enjojonent,  which  has  the  same  effect  on 
him  that  seeing  others  playing  a  game  has  on 
the  depressive  insane,  or  the  sight  of  people 
eating  heartily  upon  the  seasick. 

The  sight  of  a  cheerful  sick  man  who  is  not 
a  Christian  is  both  remarkable  and  stimulating 
because  it  is  both  abnormal  and  attractive  like 
a  black  eyed  child  with  golden  hair.  Similar 
but  more  pathetic  is  the  sight  of  a  lunatic 
displaying  a  grin,  which  is  ghastly.  But  the 
spectacle  of  one  morally  bad  in  the  aspect  of 
good  cheer  transcends  the  singularity  of  a 
pleased  invalid  and  the  horror  of  a  maniac's 
laughter,  for  it  forces  upon  the  sight  of  the 
shuddering  beholder  an  image  of  the  Father  of 
Lies. 


XI 

God,  the  Clergy,  and  Some  Modern  Writers 

Unbiased  thought  and  examination  reveal 
that  God  does  not  change  and  that  the  clergy 
are  not,  necessarily,  queer.  The  clergy  are 
much  the  same  as  other  members  of  their  race, 
the  human.  Like  the  Apostles,  mostly  rugged 
fishermen,  many  of  them  are  even  robust.  Now- 
adays they  are  climbing  Mount  McKinley,  in 
the  trenches,  coaching  football  teams  or  writing 
books  the  same  as  other  men.  There  comes  to 
mind  that  notable  figure  of  "muscular  Chris- 
tianity," Moses,  the  negro  monk  of  the  Thebaid 
who  is  alleged  to  have  captured  and  bound  four 
brigands  who  attacked  him  in  his  lonely  cell, 
and,  slinging  them  in  pairs  over  his  shoulders, 
carried  them  several  miles  across  the  sand  to 
the  nearest  church  where  he  flung  them  down 
before  the  altar  as  a  preliminary  to  their  con- 
version ! 

Moses  of  Nitria  antedated  Stephen  Langton 
and  Alcuin  of  York  by  several  centuries.  These 
later  decadent  persons  performed  no  feats 
greater  than  to  frame  Magna  Charta  and  regu- 
late Charlemagne.  Neither  would  have  been 
able  to  manage  the  four  brigands.  But  anyone 
who  chose  to  form  his  opinion  of  the  clergy  of 
today  by  reading  about  them  in  the  works  of 
modern  writers  would  inevitably  acquire  the 

137 


138   THE  GAEDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

idea  that  the  degeneracy  herewith  indicated  had 
progressed  more  rapidly  than  either  the  prob- 
abihties  or  the  facts  would  justify.  The  cleric 
of  modern  literature  is  a  curious  personage. 
Sometimes  he  is  a  crank,  sometimes  merely  an 
imbecile,  often  only  wooden  and  inert,  abnormal 
and  untrue  to  life.  He  is  afraid  of  cows.  Less 
manly  than  the  feminists  themselves,  he  lan- 
guishes at  things  called  pink  teas,  and  does 
moderately  well  at  croquet. 

The  silly  young  parson  in  "Penrod"  is  an 
excellent  example.  The  Rev.  Mr.  Kinosling  is- 
not  only  an  ass,  he  is  an  impossible  ass.  He  is 
the  only  abnormal  character  in  that  charming 
and  popular  book.  One  gets  the  same  impres- 
sion from  the  books  of  Victor  L.  Whitechurch, 
widely  read  in  England,  and  in  which  all  the 
clergy  seem  gratuitously  overdrawn.  Out  of 
several  dozen  clerical  characters  which  have 
appeared  in  the  fiction  of  several  great  w^eeklies 
during  the  past  seven  or  eight  years  I  recall 
only  two  who  are  natural  limnan  beings.  The 
first  is  the  hero  in  one  of  Dr.  Rowland's  tales 
in  the  Saturday  Evening  Post  who  was  a  clergy- 
man only  in  name,  he  having  allowed  liimself 
to  be  made  a  deacon  in  the  Episcopal  Church 
out  of  gratitude  to  the  missionary  society  which 
had  paid  for  his  education !  And  the  second  is 
Margaret  Deland's  wholly  delightful  ''Dr. 
Lavandar,"  under  wdiose  beneficent  sweetness 
of  character  one  would  like  to  have  been 
brought  up,  and  who  is  as  real  a  clergyman  as 
can  l3e  found  in  literature.  The  hero  in  ''The 
Liside  of  the  Cup"  is  almost  as  thoroughgoing 
an  ass  as  Hall  Caine's  "Christian"  the  Rev. 


GOD,  CLERGY,  MODERN  WRITERS    139 

John  Storm,  or  as  any  of  the  other  bewildering 
types  of  clerics  in  that  tale  of  religious  par- 
anoia. 

Isaac  Sykes,  the  clergyman  in  Mr.  John  Gor- 
don's book,  "Broken  Shackles,"  is  a  person 
of  another  kidney  altogether.  Sykes  is  not 
precisely  a  comic  clergyman ;  but  it  is  by  virtue 
pf  the  literary  device  of  the  "Comic  Relief" 
only  that  he  is  introduced  into  the  book  at  all ; 
and  his  author  very  properly  has  made  him  a 
very  Poor  Stick  indeed.  He  is  the  pastor  of 
a  church  in  a  mill  town,  whose  function  is  to 
"save  the  souls  of  the  well-to-do."  It  is  not 
even  clear  what  "denomination"  he  belongs  to. 
He  has  some  small  candles  grouped  near  his 
pulpit,  but  subordinated  to  the  large  candle 
which  stands  just  by  it.  He  also  has  "canticles" 
in  his  church ;  and  Mr.  Gordon,  for  what  reason 
is  not  clear,  has  equipped  this  small-town  non- 
descript with  the  title  of  a  Dean!  He  is  the 
"Very  Reverend  Sykes,"  goodness  knows  why. 
This  writer,  probably  in  his  desire  to  lampoon 
the  practice,  also  refers  to  his  clergyman  as 
"Reverend  Sykes,"  the  enormity  of  which 
phraseology,  w^hen  used  seriously — as  it  is  every 
day,  especially  in  newspapers — becomes  fully 
apparent  when  it  is  compared  to  its  exact  equiv- 
alent, "Honorable  McGoogin,"  as  a  definitive, 
titular  description  of,  say,  an  Alderman! 

The  candles,  the  canticles,  and  the  "Very" 
would  seem  to  indicate  a  kind  of  degenerated 
Episcopalian ;  although  the  fact  that  Sykes  con- 
ducts his  services  "from  the  pulpit"  is  a  dis- 
tinct 2Jer  contra  piece  of  internal  evidence  that 
he  is  one  of  our  sectarian  brethren.  One  "pays 


140   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

one's  money"  for  this  book — and  gets  an  ex- 
cellent story — but  is  constrained  to  ' '  take  one 's 
choice"  as  to  the  denominational  affiliation  of 
its  clerical  mud-turtle. 

This  tendency  to  make  clergymen  absurd  is 
comparatively  recent.  The  clergy  of  earlier 
authors  are  not  thus  conspicuous.  Stiggins  is 
perhaps  the  best  known  of  the  earlier  types. 
Stiggins  was  not  a  member  of  the  Establish- 
ment, it  is  true,  and  his  eccentricities  are  such 
as  belong  to  his  date  and  type,  but  he  does  not 
stand  out  conspicuously  from  the  other  Pick- 
wickians.  Winkle  is  an  exaggerated  adolescent, 
Tupman  an  exaggerated  old  beau,  Snodgrass 
an  exaggerated  literary  bluffer,  the  elder  Wel- 
ler  a  very  epitome  of  fat  coachmen.  Pott  and 
Slurk  overdo  their  rhetoric,  their  cowardice, 
and  their  defiance;  and  Stiggins  is  no  more 
overdrawn  than  they;  he  fits  into  the  tale  ex- 
actly. 

But  Kinosling  does  not  fit  into  the  ''Penrod" 
story  exactly  because  he  is  the  only  exaggerat- 
ed character  in  the  book.  He  is  a  burlesque 
parson,  while  the  barber  is  an  every-day  bar- 
ber, and  is  comic  just  because  he  talks  and  acts 
exactly  like  an  every-day  barber.  Marjorie 
Jones  is  a  normal  little  girl  with  beaux,  Mr. 
Schofield  a  normal  businessman.  The  things 
done  by  Sam  Williams,  Rupe  Collins,  Bartet 
the  dancing  master,  and  Delia  the  cook  are  rea- 
sonable things,  while  Kinosling  is  abnormal 
and  unreasonable.  The  things  the  other  char- 
acters say  might  have  been  taken  from  dicta- 
phones ;  but  no  mortal  lips  of  a  live  parson  ever 
framed  the  effervescent  inanities  which  pour  in 


GOD,  CLERGY,  MODERN  WRITERS    141 

one  continuous  stream  from  the  mouth,  of  Mr. 
Tarkington's  clerical  saphead.  He  is  as  appro- 
priate in  the  story  as  a  slapstick  would  be  in  a 
delicate  comedy. 

It  is  true  that  a  clergyman  may  be  odd,  ped- 
antic, wicked,  crazy,  or  comic,  but  so  also  may 
be  a  jockey,  a  grocer,  a  plumber,  a  doctor  of 
medicine,  or  a  vegetable  pedlar.  There  is  noth- 
ing in  the  dress,  manners,  conversation,  or  gen- 
eral appearance  of  the  clergy  as  a  class  to  mark 
them  off  as  especially  amenable  to  the  kind  of 
literary  treatment  they  almost  invariably  re- 
ceive. The  clergy  are  not  addicted  to  practices 
which  are  unusual  and  therefore,  by  good  psy- 
chology, ridiculous,  like  the  wearing  of  mon- 
ocles. They  do  not  habitually  give  utterance  to 
strange  cries  in  public  as  do  the  uncouth  col- 
lectors of  rags  and  old  iron.  Even  the  clerical 
silk  hat  when  worn  is  not  vivid  scarlet  like  the 
hat  of  the  rotund  negro  who  advertises  second- 
floor  dentists'  offices  on  the  avenues  of  great 
cities. 

Most  educated  men,  such  as  are  capable  of 
w^riting  books,  are  familiar  with  the  clergy. 
Mr.  Tarkington,  by  his  portrayal  of  the  minor 
character  Ladew  in  "The  Conquest  of  Canaan" 
has  demonstrated  that  he  understands  clergy- 
men; and  yet  Kinosling  crops  up  in  ''Penrod!" 
Mr.  Winston  Churchill  is  a  Churchman  of  prom- 
inence and  yet  the  central  character  in  ''The 
Inside  of  the  Cup"  is  unlike  a  real  clergyman. 
After  ten  years'^  active  parochial  work  he  does 
no  know  how  to  make  a  parish  call.  Mr.  White- 
church,  more  than  any  of  the  others,  should 
know  his  subject,  for  he  is  an  ecclesiastical 


142   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

writer.  His  books  bear  the  same  relation  to 
the  Church  as  those  of  Eden  Philpotts  to  Dart- 
moor or  W.  W.  Jacobs  to  sailormen.  Yet  Mr. 
AVhitechurch 's  numerous  clergymen  are  absurd 
images  while  his  other  characters  are  natural 
and  sane. 

This  phenomenon  of  undue  exaggeration  may 
be  explicable  on  the  ground  that  it  lies  in  the 
same  plane  as  the  general  impression  that  if  a 
talking  woodchuck  should  be  discovered  it  would 
be  in  Winsted,  Conn.,  or  that  every  resident  of 
Hackensack,  N.  J.,  habitually  goes  about  in 
overalls  and  chin  whiskers — except,  of  course, 
the  women,  who  are  equipped  with  sunbonnets 
and  gingham  aprons,  and  invariably  carry  milk 
pails.  As  a  matter  of  fact  Winsted  is  a  fac- 
tory town  in  a  prosaic,  industrial  district,  the 
last  place  to  look  for  the  marvels  of  natural 
history  so  familiar  to  the  constant  readers  of 
metropolitan  dailies;  while  Hackensack  is  a 
suburban  town  almost  entirely  populated  by 
city  businessmen  and  their  families.  In  other 
words  the  phenomenon  may  be  due  to  the  fact 
that  a  crystallized  literary  technique  has  been 
unquestionably  accepted  by  modern  writers. 

All  this  could  have  only  such  value  as  at- 
taches to  it  as  a  fact  in  the  general  field  of 
literary  criticism  if  it  were  not  accompanied 
by  a  kindred  technical  point  of  view  regarding 
God.  The  years  since  the  opening  of  the  twen- 
tieth century  have  seen  produced  notable  work 
from  a  whole  group  of  writers  who  are  inter- 
ested in  God  as  a  subject  for  literary  composi- 
tion, and  in  this  time  a  great  deal  has  been 
published  in  which  God  has  been  prominent. 


GOD,  CLERGY,  MODERN  WRITERS    143 

Algernon  Blackwood,  H.  G.  Wells,  G.  Lowes 
Dickinson,  G.  B.  Shaw,  Donald  Hankey — it 
would  be  easy  to  make  a  long  list — have  ''fea- 
tured" God  in  their  books.  So  has  a  great 
host  of  poets  and  versifiers  of  every  known 
school  and  description.  The  Great  War,  cut- 
ting abruptly  into  this  period  of  renewed  pro- 
duction, greatly  enhanced  the  literary  value  of 
God  to  the  writers  because  it  turned  the  minds 
of  the  reading  public  away  from  froth  to  actu- 
alities. 

God,  the  Central  Actuality  of  the  universe, 
has  been  thrust  upward  and  forward  into  hu- 
man consciousness,  and  hence  into  the  open 
light  of  intellectual  consideration  for  the  whole 
educated  world.  Therefore  we  see  the  unpre- 
cedented phenomenon  of  popularity  accruing  to 
writers  who  present  in  verse  and  essay  and  even 
in  fiction  the  various  subjective  gods  of  their 
own  variant  intellects.  God  has  been,  as  it 
were,  explained;  pantheistically,  transcenden- 
tally,  deistically,  and  by  the  various  kinds  of 
agnostics.  Every  imaginable  half-fonned, 
speculative,  reconstructed,  and  impossibly  idi- 
otic kind  of  god  that  the  queer  minds  of  men 
can  transmute  into  the  objective  of  modernistic 
appreciation  through  the  medium  of  literary 
expression  has  been  rushed  into  print,  from  the 
god  of  Rabindranath  Tagore  to  the  god  of 
Donald  Hankey.  In  fact  it  becomes  more  and 
more  surprising  the  more  one  thinks  of  it, 
that  a  cubist  has  not  given  this  weary  world 
another  prod  by  producing  a  purple  and  green 
portrait  of  the  god  of  Remy  de  Gourmont;  or 
an  agile  torsionist  a  bust  of  the  tutelary  divinity 


144   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

of  Ezra  Pound  done  in  a  medium  of  cigar  ashes 
and  honey. 

Mr.  Wells  seems  to  have  made  the  deepest 
and  widest  impression  with  his  god — the  god  of 
Britling,  the  Invisible  King,  the  Animator  of 
the  Soul  of  a  Bishop — that  curious,  limited  tri- 
partite deity  which  Mr.  Wells  himself  and  most 
of  his  public  believe  he  has  discovered  but  who 
really  is  an  old  acquaintance  to  the  delver  into 
the  lore  of  the  Early  Spring  of  Christianity. 

It  is,  however,  in  his  chapter  on  "The  Reli- 
gious Revival,"  a  matter  of  fifteen  pages  in 
"Italy,  France  and  Britain  at  War"  that  Mr. 
Wells  in  undertaking  again  the  role  of  a  reli- 
gious prognosticator  has  done  me  the  favor  of 
corroborating  a  favorite  idea — the  theory  that 
people  seem  to  employ  two  distinct  intellects 
when  they  attempt  to  think.  One  of  these  is  a 
workable  intellect  used  for  the  everyday  affairs 
of  life,  such  as  raising  babies,  purchasing  boots, 
or  constructing  silo  tanks.  The  other  is  a 
flabby  thing  devoted  exclusively  to  the  consid- 
eration of  religious  matters. 

In  the  book  just  referred  to  Mr.  Wells  takes 
up  various  aspects  of  the  War  with  the  master- 
ly reasoning  and  cultivated  prophetic  propensi- 
ties and  acute  sense  of  balance  derived  from 
many  years  of  literary  craftsmanship  and 
leaves  his  reader  stirred,  or  convinced,  or  intel- 
ligently hostile  as  he  always  does.  But  when 
the  reader  reaches  the  little  chapter  on  religion 
he  might  suppose  it  had  been  interpolated  by 
one  of  Mr.  Wells'  enemies  to  destroy  the  book 
as  a  work  of  art,  just  as  one  might,  with  similar 
intent,  crudely  introduce  a  putty  image,  moulded 


GOD,  CLERGY,  MODERN  WRITERS    145 

by  a  house  painter,  among  the  Elgin  Marbles. 
What  has  happened  is  only  that  Mr.  Wells  has, 
for  these  fifteen  pages,  shut  off  the  splendidly- 
running,  high-powered  engine  of  his  trained  in- 
tellect, and  while  this  rests,  he  uses  his  other 
intellect,  which  might  be  described  in  the  argot 
of  the  garage  as  a  "one-lunger." 

With  his  god  at  the  back  of  his  mind,  Mr. 
Wells  discusses  the  religious  aspects  of  the 
War.  He  speaks  of  three  definite  things:  1, 
The  late  Pope's  Attitude  to  the  War;  2,  Essex 
ladies  asking  Co-operation  of  the  Wells  House- 
hold in  Prayer;  3,  An  Address  of  the  Bishop 
of  London  on  Tower  Hill  in  Justification  of  His 
Salary  of  Ten  Thousand  Pounds.  The  pope  is 
dismissed  in  a  very  few  words,  which  is  all  his 
attitude  on  the  war  seems  to  deserve.  Then 
Mr.  Wells  tells  his  readers  that  he  ''civilly  re- 
pulsed" the  ladies.  He  wanted  a  satisfactory 
ending  to  the  War;  that  is  why  he  wrote  the 
book  about  it.  He  tells  us  in  it  that  he  believes 
in  God  and  urges  people  to  be  loyal  to  God. 
But  when  some  ladies  of  his  home  parish  in 
"blue  dresses  and  adorned  with  large,  white 
crosses,"  also  believing  in  God,  come  to  his 
house  to  request  that  prayer  be  made  to  God 
about  the  common  desire  of  all  concerned,  Mr. 
Wells  contemptuously  dismisses  the  whole  mat- 
ter as  being  ' '  in  the  nature  of  a  magic  incanta- 
tion." Then  he  closes  his  chapter  on  the  reli- 
gious aspects  of  the  Great  War  in  the  belief 
that  the  religious  activities  of  the  Bishop  of 
London  are  limited  to  the  justifying  of  his 
stipend.  It  seems  not  to  occur  to  Mr.  Wells 
when  he   scarifies  the  "Genteel  Whigs"  for 


146   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

their  apathy  to  Britain's  cause,  that  he  mani- 
fests an  equally  inexcusable  apathy  to  Britain 's 
religion.  He  admits  being  a  "lapsed  Anglican." 
He  perpetrates  the  verbal  distinction  between 
"Anglicans"  and  "Catholics,"  a  looseness  of 
diction  probably  unparalleled  elsewhere  in  his 
entire  published  w^orks. 

The  text, ' '  What  are  we  up  to  ? "  runs  through 
all  the  books  in  the  manner  of  ' '  Marriage ' '  and 
"Tono  Bungay" — the  phase  of  Wells  just  pre- 
ceding his  trilogy  of  books  about  God.  Mr. 
Wells  has  reasoned  out  and  defined  almost  every 
human  issue  of  modern  interest  except  religion 
itself,  and  here  he  seems  to  hold  with  the  other 
revivers  of  God  in  modern  literature  that  the 
things  of  religion  must  and  should  remain  in  a 
kind  of  dim,  individualistic  liaze.  It  is  interest- 
ing to  watch  this  keen  thinker  floundering  help- 
lessly among  the  elementary  matters  of  reli- 
gion, and  one  naturally  wonders  what  he  thinks 
he  is  up  to.  He  can  say:  "Now  sex,  like  diet, 
is  a  department  of  conduct  and  a  very  import- 
ant department,  hut  it  isn't  religion!"  (Italics 
his.)  But  one  wonders  what  the  content  of 
religion  can  be  to  Mr.  Wells  when  within  a  few 
lines  of  this  he  condemns  prayer  as  a  "magic 
incantation. ' ' 

The  god  of  Mr.  Wells  appears  to  be  the  off- 
spring of  compelling  emotions,  to  be  evolved 
from  within,  to  have  been  thrust  up  through 
many  strata  of  consciousness,  like  the  subjec- 
tive camel  of  the  German  savant,  and  set  down 
in  travail  of  soul  for  Mr.  Wells'  readers  to 
scrutinize.  It  would  appear  that  this  god  is 
final,  and  entirely  satisfactory  to  Mr.  Wells, 


GOD,  CLERGY,  MODERN  WRITERS      147 

and  that  to  it  must  religious  expression  conform 
or  be  forever  discredited.  But  Mr.  Wells  has 
not  created  this  god.  He  has  only  refurbished 
the  demiurge  of  the  Gnostics. 


XII 

A  Task  fob  Seminaeiai^s 

Many  of  us,  both  in  England  and  America, 
took  heart  from  one  aspect  of  Wartime,  to  wit : 
that  bread  and  meat  had  replaced  the  dallying 
with  unwholesome  sweets  with  which  we  had, 
speaking  religiously,  become  somewhat  sur- 
feited. Under  that  desperate  stress  we  all  got 
down  to  bed-rock  and  worked  on  the  things  that 
counted  in  winning  the  war. 

Now,  however,  we  are  in  the  trough  of  a 
reaction  corresponding  to  the  extraordinary 
exertions  of  that  desperate  period,  and  the 
least  pessimistic  of  us  realizes  that  things  are 
not  going  on  as  well  as  we  had  hoped  they 
would.  Many  of  us  had  hoped  that  the  un- 
ornamented  gospel  would  have  received  such 
emphasis  for  its  practicability  that  reconstruc- 
tion, when  it  necessarily  came,  would  follow  the 
lines  of  getting  down  to  business. 

But  it  has  not  been  so,  at  least  to  the  degree 
which  some  of  us  had  anticipated  for  the  re- 
newal among  the  English-speaking  peoples. 
The  same  banalities  are  still  with  us,  and  have 
even,  in  many  quarters,  received  a  new  lease 
of  life  from  the  policy  of  the  American  Church 
to  express  itself  so  largely  in  punditism,  ''field- 
secretaryism, "  committees,  minor  movements, 
panaceas,  muddle,  and  the  immense  amount  of 

148 


A  TASK  FOR  SEMINARIANS       149 

talk  which  it  has  recently  been  uttering  through 
the  Nation-Wide  CampaigTi  as  interpreted  in 
many  quarters. 

In  England  it  is  necessary  to  fight  against 
conditions  which  allow  a  Welsh  dissenter  to 
select  the  Bishops  of  God's  Church,  the  in- 
trenched type  of  fogeyism,  plain  dufferism, 
sinecures,  barter  of  advowsons,  unequal  dis- 
tribution of  funds — many  matters  of  that  kind. 
Our  o\\ni  problems  in  the  Church  are  different 
in  kind,  as  indeed  our  whole  national  problem 
is  different,  and  we  might  sum  up  our  diffi- 
culties in  a  broad,  general  way,  as  consisting 
of  the  ecclesiastical  vice  of  timidity,  the  pas- 
sion for  substitutes,  and  the  wrong  emphasis 
on  what  is  to  be  taught  in  the  Church's  semin- 
aries. These  tend  to  handicap  us  with  the  de- 
sire to  compromise  issues,  the  presence  of  lead- 
ers addicted  to  panaceas,  and  a  body  of  clergy 
less  efficient  than  they  might  well  be. 

Back  of  these  and  of  all  the  wrong  conditions 
in  Anglicanism  is  a  padded  cross.  What  is 
always  needed  in  religious  revival  or  renewal 
is  to  get  back  to  Christ,  a  good  phrase,  w^hich 
had  been  popularized  by  the  somewhat  under- 
equipped  theologians  who  wish  to  re-write  our 
theology  for  us.  As  soon  as  anyone  gets  to 
see  that  it  is  necessary  to  go  straight  back  to 
Christ,  the  Source  of  the  Christian  Religion  and 
of  life,  he  is,  at  the  very  outset,  confronted  by 
a  cross.  It  is  inescapeable.  He  may  ignore  it, 
but  the  price  of  that  is  to  have  his  effort  auto- 
matically and  effectually  vitiated.  There  stands 
the  cross,  looming  blackly  down  through  the 
Christian  centuries,  and  God  Incarnate  is  hang- 


150   THE  GAEDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

ing  on  it,  suffering;  fighting  a  silent,  bitter 
fight,  against  sin,  the  powers  of  darkness,  and 
death.  That  is  why  there  is  so  much  of  ro- 
mance in  being  a  sacramentalist;  and  so  little 
in  being  a  Modernist;  why  the  Bishop  of  Zan- 
zibar, for  all  his  sternness,  is  so  engaging,  and 
why  the  Bishop  of  Hereford,  brilliant  creature 
though  he  is,  is  so  uninteresting;  why  catholic- 
ity is  so  greatly  feared  and  respected  by  the 
world,  and  why  the  general  public  is  so  abys- 
mally indifferent  to  ecclesiastical  ''attrac- 
tions." 

Very  many  have  attempted  to  meet  what  they 
call  "The  Challenge  of  the  Times"  with  sub- 
stitutes for  the  plain  gospel.  The  efforts  to 
take  up  the  "Challenge"  with  Field  Secre- 
taries, Pleasant  Sunday  Afternoons,  Pan- 
Protestantism,  inviting  assorted  sectarians  to 
address  the  people  during  Lent,  "Men  and  Re- 
ligion Forward  Movements,"  Lifework  Con- 
ferences, etc.,  etc.,  etc.,  will  doubtless  continue 
to  be  made  by  the  many  who  do  not  trust  the 
Christian  Religion  as  we  have  it  from  Christ, 
and  will  continue  to  fail  because  fads  will  not 
do  the  work  of  the  Christian  Religion.  The 
only  wonder  is  why  anyone  can  possibly  sup- 
pose that  they  will ! 

The  only  perceptible  effect  of  such  activities 
is  to  make  the  existing  confusion  of  thought 
and  practice  wdthin  the  Church  many  times 
worse  confounded.  The  energy  which  should 
and  could  be  concentrated  on  the  essentials  is 
dissipated  among  a  multiplicity  of  minor  and 
unrelated  activities,  manv  of  which  are  no  more 


A  TASK  FOR  SEMINARIANS       151 

logically  connected  with  normal  Christianity 
than  they  are  with  Judaism. 

It  is,  of  course,  the  gist  of  the  gospel  which 
must  necessarily  be  presented,  if  there  is  to  be 
any  song  at  all  sung  to  the  more  or  less  elab- 
orate accompaniment  which  we  hear  all  about 
us.  This  gist  must  be  animated  and  vivified  by 
the  lesson  of  the  cross,  the  medicine  of  the 
world.  Christianity's  central  activity  is  to 
conduct  its  age-long  warfare  against  sin,  the 
enemy  of  mankind.  This  is  carried  on  within 
the  Church  both  by  the  individual  as  such  and 
by  the  pastorally-guided  corporate  conscious- 
ness of  the  people  according  to  their  units  in 
parish,  and  diocese,  and  national  Church;  it  is 
carried  on  by  Christians  duly  baptized,  con- 
firmed, constantly  purified  by  penance  from  the 
guilt  of  sins,  fortified  by  the  sacraments,  pay- 
ing God  His  worship  due  by  participation  in 
the  Great  Sacrifice  which  is  Christ's  own 
service. 

It  is,  of  course,  the  neglect  of  these  central 
matters  of  the  Christian  life  which  makes  all 
the  generally-recognized  trouble.  It  ought,  for 
example,  to  be  a  commonplace  that  Christian- 
ity, never  having  been  adequately  tried,  had 
not  ceased  to  operate  adequately  as  the  re- 
ligion of  the  world.  Yet  there  are  numerous 
persons  within  and  without  the  Church  who 
continue  to  ask,  "Has  the  Church  failed?"  or 
even,  taking  the  failure  for  granted,  put  their 
query  in  the  form,  "Why  has  the  Church 
failed?"  Christianity  has  not  failed.  Chris- 
tianity has  not  been  tried  except  in  a  very  small 
way,  relatively  speaking. 


152        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

Here,  then,  is  another  problem  for  the  lead- 
ers— the  clergy.  And  why,  we  may  pertinently 
ask,  just  why,  does  a  skilled  mechanic  receive 
$1.20  per  hour  and  a  clergyman  of  the  Epis- 
copal Church  35c  per  hour  (figuring  an  eight- 
hour  day)  in  return  for  work  done  and  paid 
for  by  employers?  Simply  because  a  skilled 
mechanic's  services  are  valued  at  that  figure 
and  a  clergjTnan's  at  this.  And  just  why  so? 
Clearly,  because  the  activities  of  the  skilled 
mechanic  are  restricted  to  the  performance  of 
his  proper  work  as  such,  while  the  clergyman 
spends  his  time  in  the  performance  of  a  variety 
of  functions  many  of  which  are  only  remotely 
related  to  his  profession,  and  which  are  valued 
at  a  low  market  price  because  that  is  the  wage 
of  the  Jack-of -all-trades. 

It  is  only  a  great  river  that  can  be  both  broad 
and  deep  at  the  same  time ;  and  it  is  only  a  very 
great  man  who  can  spread  his  activities  over 
varied  fields  and  at  the  same  time  sustain  a 
character  of  really  adequate  ability  throughout 
all  or  even  in  a  few  of,  the  essentials.  As  in 
other  professions,  the  reverend  clergj'-  are  all 
kinds  of  men,  and  only  a  few  are  truly  great. 
It  is  also  fact  that  the  curriculum  of  the  aver- 
age seminary  of  the  Church  includes  so  much 
that  must  be  ' '  covered ' '  during  the  three  years 
that  the  tendency  is  to  turn  out  men  half- 
taught  in  a  large  selection  of  subjects  rather 
than  well-taught  in  the  several  essentials. 

This  condition  if  true  is,  at  least  in  part,  due 
to  the  seminarians  themselves,  and  the  worst 
result  of  it  is  that  the  lay  people  to  be  served 
by  those  clergy  in  future  years  will  be  apt  not 


A  TASK  FOR  SEMINARIANS       153 

to  get  the  essentials  of  a  normal  pastorate. 
When  in  the  course  of  his  pastoral  career  the 
priest  realizes,  as  frequently  he  does,  that  he 
cannot,  as  a  Jack-of-all-trades,  get  the  results 
which  his  early  idealism  demanded  of  him,  he 
is,  in  turn,  apt  to  go  the  wrong  way  about  the 
remedy,  and  to  spread  himself  wider  and  cor- 
respondingly ever  thinner  over  his  parish, 
rather  than  to  regulate  his  affairs  so  that  he 
can  pick  up  the  neglected  threads  and  re-make 
himself  along  useful  lines  of  development.  This 
is  because  the  thinner-spreading  process  is  by 
far  the  easier  course  to  pursue.  It  lies  directly 
before  him  if  he  desire  to  undertake  it,  whereas, 
if  he  retrench  mentally  and  spiritually,  it  means 
that  he  must  seriously  incommode  himself,  and 
perhaps  others  involved  with  him.  For  example, 
it  might  mean  in  some  cases  resignation  of  a 
cure,  with  all  the  risk  involved  in  securing  an- 
other, under  present  conditions  in  the  Church. 
It  might  mean  cutting  down  on  various  activi- 
ties to  which,  by  habituation,  he  had  become 
greatly  attached.  It  might  spell  serious  finan- 
cial embarrassment,  especially  if  he  were 
equipped  with  a  family  of  his  own.  He  may  be 
too  old  to  study. 

But  the  remedy  for  all  this  lies,  chiefly,  in 
realizing  the  underlying  facts  while  the  per- 
son preparing  for  the  sacred  ministry  is  still 
in  the  course  of  his  preparation  in  the  sem- 
inary. To  a  certain  extent  the  "tone"  of  any 
seminary  is  in  the  control  of  the  student  body. 
If  the  man  who  aspires  to  be  a  priest  does  not 
wash  to  come  to  a  point  in  his  ministry''  at  which 
he  is  to  realize  how  under-equipped  he  is  to 


154   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

deal  with  certain  serious  problems  which  should 
be  (and  sometimes  force  themselves  to  be)  cen- 
tral in  his  work  for  God  among  hmnan  souls, 
he  must  look  ahead  and  look  within,  and  look 
about  him  at  what  he  works  upon.  Seminary- 
students  are,  taken  as  a  whole,  an  intensely 
attractive  group  of  young  men.  Their  vision  is 
likely  to  be  clear,  their  faculties  at  the  keenest 
and  most  critical  stage  of  formative  develop- 
ment, their  ideals  relatively  undimmed,  and 
they  are,  corporately,  beset  with  a  high  desire 
to  go  to  work  for  God  in  His  garden.  Such 
men  are  open-minded  on  the  whole,  and  it 
should  not  be  difficult  to  convince  them  that 
they  are  clearly  entitled  to  a  training  in  the 
details  and  practices  of  the  religion  they  are 
to  teach,  and  in  time  corporately  to  regulate, 
after  they  have  obtained  Holy  Orders.  Their 
future  task,  speaking  strategically,  is  to  reor- 
ganize Anglicanism,  and  they  must  realize  that 
this  tremendous  task  cannot  well  be  accom- 
plished if  their  equipment  is  to  consist  too 
largely  of  a  smattering  of  Hebrew,  a  thorough- 
going knowledge  of  economics,  a  great  deal  of 
Church-School  pedagogy,  an  obsession  in 
favour  of  eschatology,  or  even  a  hard-earned 
academic  skill  in  the  rudiments  of  Social 
Service,  supplemented  by  occasional  visits  to 
the  nearby  factories  and  state  institutions.  It 
cannot  so  be  done,  and  as  soon  as  the  semin- 
arians realize  that  it  must  be  done,  it  is  the 
writer's  belief  that  the  Church  will  get  action 
— quick,  effective,  and  compelling. 

The  Church  seminary  student  is  committed 
to  a  system  which,  for  better  or  worse,  hap- 


A  TASK  FOR  SEMINAEIANS        155 

pens  to  be  a  sacramental  system,  with  a  not- 
to-be-ignored  mystical  aspect.    The  life  of  the 
ideal  cleric  must  be  both  a  reservoir  and  a 
fountain  of  spirituality.    Every  priest,  ideally, 
must  drink  often,  long,  and  refreshingly  at  the 
ever-flowing   spring  of   Christ's   life.     Christ 
Himself  is  not  so  much  the  Giver  of  life  in  the 
religion  named  after  Him ;  He  is  that  life.    To 
that  life  every  student  of  Christ 's  is  entitled  to 
access.     If  in  his  seminary  he  is  denied  free 
access  to  that  life,  if  his  days  are  too  much 
taken  up  with  things  academic  or  details  in 
petto,  he  should,  if  necessary,  go  the  length  of 
demanding  that  access.     He  must  have  sacra- 
mental life  provided  for  him.    If,  for  example, 
the  reverend  faculty  is  collectively  too  lazy  to 
take  turns  at  celebrating  so  that  the  students 
may  have  the  advantage  of  a  daily  Eucharist, 
the  students  must  see  to  it  that  they  have  such 
provision  made  for  them;  through  the  legiti- 
mate  channels,   of  course — this  is  no   Soviet 
counsel !    Students  in  seminaries  must  get  into 
the  way  of  leading  Christ 's  life,  other^\ise  they 
will  never  be  able  to  induce  others  to  lead  it; 
and,  if  they  fail  to  get  others  to  lead  it,  their 
ministry  will  have  been  a  failure  from  any 
legitimate    standpoint.     No    one   can   give   to 
others    what    he    does    not    himself    possess. 
Starved  souls  cannot  be  fed,  even  by  Rural 
methods  or  by  scientific  economics,  even  though 
in  one's  ministry  starved  bodies  may,   from 
time  to  time,  be  fed  through  Social  Service. 
But  if  one  base  his  ministry  upon  centralizing 
Social  Service,  that  ministry  mil,  in  the  nature 
of  things,  even  though  a  success  on  its  own 


156        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

plane,  be  a  very  slight  thing  when  compared 
with  the  great  and  worthy  body  of  secular 
benevolence  which  makes  the  name  American 
to  be  blessed  by  the  oppressed  of  the  world. 
The  great  difficulty  with  Social  Service  (ex- 
cept it  be  carried  on  on  a  world  scale  as  Mr. 
Herbert  Hoover  was  able  to  do  in  his  magnifi- 
cent work  during  and  after  the  Great  War)  is 
that  in  any  community  as  more  and  more  peo- 
ple join  the  ranks  of  the  workers  in  it,  less  and 
less  people  remain  to  be  the  objective  of  the 
service,  and  so  the  very  success  of  this  move- 
ment tends  to  destroy  it  as  a  religious  expres- 
sion. An  ideal  of  Fellowship  which  would,  in 
its  nature,  include  all  the  details  of  the  small- 
scale  Social  Service  as  practiced  by  ''Modern 
Churchmen"  would  be  a  far  higher  and  more 
worthy  ideal,  even  though  it  need  not,  neces- 
sarily, be  even  Christian.  Very  splendid  or- 
ganized Fellowship  including  all  the  Social 
Service  details  is  practiced  by  organized  Juda- 
ism, in  the  name  and  in  the  spirit  of  our  com- 
mon humanity. 

The  cure  of  souls  involves  chiefly,  so  far  as 
preparation  capable  of  reception  in  a  seminary 
is  concerned,  great  knowledge  and  skill  in  the 
Moral  Theology.  To  this  more  or  less  exact 
science,  an  entire  ministry  in  all  its  details 
might  well  be  subordinated  (witness  Fr.  Stan- 
ton's) and,  by  sticking  to  that  rule,  be  made 
into  an  enormous  and  conspicuous  success.  But 
if  anyone  who  is  familiar  with  the  management 
of  the  average  seminary  will  stop  for  a  mo- 
ment to  compare  the  amount  of  time  and  effort 
put  in  upon  Moral  Theology  with  what  is  used 


A  TASK  FOR  SEMINARIANS       157 

up  over,  say,  Hebrew,  and  then  ask  himself 
how  much  of  anyone's  ministry,  under  the  most 
favorable  conditions,  could  possibly  be  based 
upon  a  knowledge  of  Hebrew,  the  point  which 
it  is  attempted  to  make  will  not  be  long  in 
emerging.  It  is,  of  course,  possible  to  get  one 's 
bishop  under  certain  circumstances  to  dispense 
from  the  Study  of  Hebrew,  but  it  is  unneces- 
sary to  get  dispensed  from  the  study  of  Moral 
Theology,  even  though  a  student  should  be  ob- 
tuse enough  to  think  M.  T.  unnecessary  because 
the  amount  of  time  spent  upon  it  on  the  aver- 
age is  practically  negligible  in  a  three  years' 
course.  There  are  several  of  the  Church's 
seminaries  in  which  there  is  no  attempt  what- 
ever to  teach  this  vitally  important  and  central 
subject. 

An  elderly  clergyman  once  told  the  writer  of 
his  experience  in  a  parish  wherein  he  had  been 
pastor  for  many  years.  It  was  an  agricultural 
community,  and  in  the  course  of  the  preceding 
twenty-five  years  the  original  inhabitants  had 
nearly  all  sold  their  land  to  Bohemian  farmers, 
and  the  parish  run  down  in  numbers  until  there 
was  only  a  pitiful  handful  of  elderly  people 
left  to  come  to  Church.  ' '  Don 't  the  Bohemians 
have  children  for  the  Sunday-school,  and  isn't 
there  any  way  to  get  the  Bohemians  to  Church? 
Don't  they  understand  English,  or  what  is  it?" 
was  asked.  "There  are  three  or  four  times  as 
many  children  in  my  village,"  said  the  elderly 
X)riest, ' '  as  there  were  in  the  old  days,  for  these 
Bohemians  have  large  families.  They  all  speak 
English,  more  or  less,  and  they  learn  rapidly. 
When  a  new  family  comes,  they  usually  attend 


158        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

Churcli  and  bring  the  children,  but  they  always 
come  to  me  to  make  their  confessions,  and  of 
course  I  can't  hear  their  confessions,  so  they 
slop  coming." 

Another  central  matter,  is  to  know  how  to 
conduct  the  various  services  of  the  Church. 
This  would  appear  to  be  so  obvious  as  not  to 
require  discussion,  but,  in  the  average  semin- 
ary, the  whole  subject  is  commonly  ignored  ex- 
cept in  the  one  technical  matter  of  the  use  of 
the  voice.  But  there  is  infinitely  more  to  the 
conduct  of  the  services  than  the  use  of  the  voice. 
It  is  as  though  a  man  were  in  training  to  be 
head  of  a  musical  conservatory  where  part  of 
his  duty  was  to  be  able  to  lead  the  conservatory 
orchestra  at  stated  and  frequent  intervals.  If 
his  training  for  this  conspicuous  duty  were 
limited  to  a  more  or  less  exact  drill  in  the 
manual  calisthenic  of  baton  swinging,  the  ab- 
surdity of  the  training  would  need  no  demon- 
stration from  any  critic.  That  is  submitted  as 
a  fair  comparison  with  the  training  received  in 
the  seminaries  with  respect  to  the  conduct  of 
religious  services.  Well  may  the  mdely-depre- 
cated  Dr.  Dearmer  point  out  to  the  Anglican 
world  that  the  Art  of  Public  Worship  is  with 
us  one  of  the  lost  arts. 

The  Church  is  full  of  priests  wiio  could  not — 
literally  could  not — go  into  some  other  parish 
Church  (in  their  own  city,  it  may  be)  and  con- 
duct the  services  there.  It  is  full  of  men  who 
do  not  know  how  to  put  on  Eucharistic  vest- 
ments ;  how  to  sing  any  of  the  parts  at  a  Choral 
Eucharist  with  deacon  and  subdeacon;  who 
could  not,  for  the  life  of  them,  conduct  a  choral 


A  TASK  FOR  SEMINARIANS        159 

evensong;  wlio  do  not  know  what  to  do  with 
their  hands  even  at  an  ordinary  Low  Celebra- 
tion; who  are  incapable  of  walking  in  a  simple 
and  dignified  manner  in  a  religions  procession ; 
who  habitually  destroy  the  inherent  solemnity 
and  reverence  of  any  service — except,  perhaps, 
Social  Service!  One  would  think  that  the 
seminary  is  the  place  where  one  who  is  to  be 
charged  with  tlie  conduct  of  necessarily  litur- 
gical acts  should  learn  these  simple  and  funda- 
mental things.  There  is  too  much  preoccupa- 
tion in  the  seminaries  to-day  with  such  mat- 
ters as  the  two  dead  languages,  technical  Sun- 
day-school methods,  social  reform,  Boy-Scout- 
ing, and  the  findings  of  Vice  Commissions — it 
w^ould  appear — to  leave  time  for  such  matters 
as  how  to  take  care  of  souls  and  how  to  con- 
duct public  worship  according  to  the  standards 
which  2,000  years  of  liturgical  development  and 
common  sense  have  managed  to  formulate. 

To  a  very  large  and  important  extent,  the 
future  of  the  Church  is  in  the  hands  of  the 
seminary  students,  for  better,  for  worse.  Most 
of  us  are  pretty  well  wearied  with  *' states- 
manship," and  fogeyism,  and  over-emphasis 
on  side  issues.  Are  the  seminary  students  go- 
ing to  do  anything  about  it  at  the  fountain- 
head,  and  so  get  the  Church — ^which  they  will 
be  called  upon  in  time  to  share  in  guiding  along 
the  years — somewhat  nearer  Christ's  ideals  in 
their  generation,  or  are  they  going  to  be  con- 
tent with  wasted  time  and  effort  about  non- 
essentials and  a  gradually-grooving,  old-crusted 
Anglican  dufferism? 


XIII 

Sample  Christians 

The  writer  is  acquainted  with  a  brother 
clergyman  who,  in  some  mysterious  manner, 
manages  to  appear  always  three  days  away 
from  having  been  shaved,  and  whose  hair  ap- 
pears always  to  be  three  weeks  away  from  hav- 
ing been  cut.  In  lighter  moments  the  solution 
of  his  method  has  sometimes  afforded  food  for 
conjecture,  and  the  only  possible  explanation 
appears  to  be  that  he  tells  the  barber  to  trim 
the  ends,  and  "shaves"  himself  with  the  kind 
of  clippers  barbers  use  on  the  lower  part  of 
one 's  neck ! 

Practically  everybody  who  knows  this  priest 
loves  him  because  of  his  sweet  simplicity  and 
kindliness,  but  he  embarrasses  some  of  his  ac- 
quaintances because  he  almost  invariably  hugs 
them,  pats  them  on  the  back,  and  utters  cer- 
tain vociferations  indicative  of  joy  when  he 
meets  them,  thus  causing  strangers  to  turn 
their  heads  and  grin.  These  doings  are  what 
people  call  his  ^ '  way, ' '  and  it  is  a  bad  way. 

A  comparison  between  the  character  and  the 
**way"  of  this  good  priest  is  something  like 
what  Dr.  Johnson  said  about  Goldsmith — poor 
honest  Noll,  who  wrote  like  an  angel  and  talked 
like  poor  Poll!  This  man  is  a  true  servant  of 
God,  his  devotion  to  God  and  to  his  people  are 

160 


SAMPLE  CHEISTIANS  161 

things  beautiful  to  see,  but  he  might  greatly 
facilitate  his  pastoral  work  and  increase  its 
effectiveness  if  he  could  be  persuaded  to  sub- 
stitute the  ordinary  manners  and  appearance 
of  gentlefolk  for  the  devastating  details  of  his 
*Svay."  This  priest  has  the  traditions  and  the 
education  of  a  gentleman,  and  along  with  these 
an  ample  income,  and  yet  he  is  the  kind  of  man 
who  wears  a  collar  several  times,  who  per- 
forms his  ablutions  sketchily,  and  Avho  leaps 
out  of  bed  ten  minutes  before  the  hour  set  for 
his  first  service  and  huddles  on  his  clothes, 
which  have  hung  over  a  chair-back  during  the 
night. 

There  is  another  priest  in  mind  who  is  very 
neat,  spick  and  span.  He  radiates  cleanliness. 
He  is  always  up  on  time,  and  shaved,  brushed, 
and  pressed  to  a  nicety.  His  household  falls 
just  short  of  being  painfully  neat  and  orderly. 
There  is  a  place  for  everything,  and  adequate 
equipment  and  system  throughout.  The  parish 
church  over  which  this  sartorial  paragon  pre- 
sides reflects  his  spirit.  It  is  a  model  of  cor- 
rectitude  and  should  be  a  joy  to  eveiy  wor- 
shiper. This  priest,  too,  is  a  godly  and  pious 
man  who  loves  God  and  serves  his  people  well, 
feeling  keenly  his  pastoral  responsibility  and 
making  the  acquisition  of  skill  in  his  proper 
work  a  matter  of  constant  study  and  watchful- 
ness. He  wastes,  however,  one  fears,  a  goodly 
portion  of  his  pastoral  influence  because,  to  put 
it  in  an  old-fashioned  phrase,  he  always  has  a 
chip  on  his  shoulder. 

He  is  perfectly  fearless,  entirely  unhampered 
by  the  corporate  timidity  which  blasts  Anglican 


162        THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

growth  so  disastrous!}^,  and  always  ready  for 
an  argument.  He  fairly  bristles  at  times.  He 
has  a  formula  for  everything  and  into  his  mould 
everything  must  fit  exactly  or  someone  risk  a 
belaboring.  He  vigorously  resents  it  if  even  a 
kindly  old  lady  of  the  Methodist  persuasion, 
who  means  to  be  courteous  and  even  motherly, 
addresses  him  otherwise  than  as  ''Father."  He 
appears  incapable  of  referring  to  the  Euchar- 
istic  Sacrifice  by  any  other  term  than  * '  Mass. ' ' 
He  is  what  Mrs.  Mandell  Creighton  described 
as  a  Katholic!  Churchmanship  is  constantly 
on  his  mind.  He  is  constantly  bracing  up  his 
catholicity  and  that  of  the  Church  by  flying 
buttresses  of  diction,  and  so  defeating  his  own 
purpose  by  thus  suggesting  that  it  is  rather 
frail  and  crumbly.  There  is  a  suggestion  of 
pertness  about  this  really  worthy  priest  and 
gentleman  quite  out  of  relation  to  such  matters 
as  incense  and  meditation  and  the  cool  grandeur 
of  noble  gothic  fabrics. 

Then  there  is  the  writer's  old  friend,  the 
great  rector,  who  has  accomplished  many  won- 
derful works  and  brought  many  souls  to  know 
and  love  their  Lord.  The  great  rector  is  a 
driving  mass  of  energetic  force,  always  battling 
and  striving  against  the  powers  of  evil  and 
making  a  noble  and  a  winning  fight  of  it.  In 
his  community  he  is  a  power,  in  the  pulpit  he 
is  mighty,  in  pastoral  visitation  indefatigable 
— ^but,  he'  is  a  great  trial  to  his  organist  because 
he  changes  his  mind  and  the  hymns  at  the  last 
instant.  His  curates  are  kept  jumping  about 
from  place  to  place  and  from  task  to  task  mth- 
out  any  regard,  it  would  seem,  to  the  fact  that 


SAMPLE  CHRISTIANS  163 

tliey  are  human  beings.  He  gives  them  con- 
flicting and  contradictory  commands,  forgetting 
when  he  tells  Brown  to  drop  what  he  is  doing 
and  rush  to  get  something  else  done,  that  Rob- 
inson did  it  a  week  ago. 

It  is  a  puzzle  to  the  great  rector's  friends 
how  his  magnificent  wife  manages  to  stand  up 
under  the  vast  load  she  is  obliged  to  carry.  It 
would  be  a  greater  puzzle  if  they  realized  how 
heavily  the  great  rector  leans  upon  his  wife, 
and  how  she  sacrifices  her  own  convenience  and 
comfort  for  him.  It  never  seems  to  occur  to  the 
great  rector  how  extremely  selfish  he  can  be, 
and  how,  in  getting  done  his  share  of  the  Lord 's 
gardening,  he  gets  in  the  way  of  all  who  are 
associated  with  him  in  kindred  tasks.  All  these 
subordinates  refrain  from  complaint,  that  is, 
'all  but  the  sexton,  who  differs  from  the  rest  in 
that  he  does  not  pray  for  strength  to  endure, 
because  he  is  a  person  of  adamantine  taciturn- 
ity, even  in  his  relations  with  God. 

Clergy  like  these,  other  kinds,  and  ''church 
workers"  in  general,  are  all  sample  Christians. 
It  is  chiefly  by  contact  with  them  that  the  peo- 
ple of  any  community  test  the  quality  of  the 
religion  which  has  jiroduced  the  outward  and 
visible  sample.  To  the  people  the.  clergy  and 
church  workers  are  the  living,  examinable 
product  of  tlie  gospel  they  represent  and  by 
which  they  live;  and  the  people's  attitude  to 
that  religion  is  apt  to  be  governed  accordingly. 
This  principle  can  be  illustrated  in  many  ways. 
For  example,  if  a  music  teacher  cannot  perform 
acceptably  upon  the  instrument  she  teaches  few 
people  will  care  to  employ  her  to  teach  their 


164   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

cliildren  to  play  that  instrnment.  If  a  tailor 
wears  ugly,  ill-fitting  clothes,  it  requires  a  kind 
of  rare,  my sticaF  faith  on  the  part  of  the  cus- 
tomer to  entrust  him  with  the  making  of 
clothes.  So  it  is  in  the  case  of  a  prominent 
Christian — a  sample  Christian.  People  may 
love  the  unshaven,  slack-dressed  priest,  but  he 
cannot  impress  them  as  a  very  wholesome  prod- 
uct of  his  own  system.  They  may  admire  the 
priest  with  the  chip  on  his  well-brushed  shoul- 
der, but  they  can  hardly  avoid  drawing  the  con- 
clusion from  contact  with  him  that  his  religion 
must  be  an  over-rigid  system.  Many  may 
revere  the  great  rector  and  even  look  up  to  him 
as  pagans  to  their  demigods;  yet  when  they 
notice  that  they  are  hugging  themselves  in  a 
spasm  of  self-congratulation  because  they  do 
not  have  to  work  for  him,  or  be  his  wife,  they 
may  possibly  go  a  step  farther  in  analysis  and 
begin  to  deprecate  the  Christianity  which  can 
produce  such  a  demeanor  in  so  very  prominent 
a  professor  of  it. 

There  is  this  much  good  in  what  has  been 
called  ' '  The  New  Morality, ' '  that  it  defines  as 
sinful  that  which  works  harm  to  one's  fellow 
man.  The  only  objection  to  this  system  is  that 
it  stops  short  of  defining  as  sin  that  which 
hurts  God.  Perhaps  to  the  New  Moralist  God 
is  too  transcendent  to  be  hurt.  But  dirtiness, 
and  truculence,  and  tyrannous  behaviour  not 
only  hurt  those  who  have  succumbed  to  these 
evils,  and  do  not  only  distress  those  surround- 
ing such  persons — they  also,  surely,  hurt  God; 
because,  man  being  in  God's  image,  they  mis- 
represent Him  whenever  they  appear  in  con- 


SAMPLE  CHRISTIANS  165 

nection  with  those  who  represent  God  to  their 
fellow  men.  If  snch  persons  are  not,  as  it  were, 
samples  of  God  Himself,  they  are  at  least 
samples  of  what  God  can  produce  in  persons 
and  lives;  and  any  who,  like  Christ  Himself, 
would  attempt  to  represent  God  to  man,  must 
be  at  his  best  and  as  much  like  God  as  possible, 
clean  and  unselfish,  gentle  and  kindly. 

These  rough  categories  do  not,  of  course, 
exhaust  the  list  of  blemishes  which  all  who  try 
to  interpret  God  would  do  well  to  avoid.  Per- 
haps the  most  prominent  of  the  many  others 
which  might  be  listed  as  weeds  in  God's  gar- 
den are  the  devastating  vices  of  timidity  and 
ignorance.  These  misrepresent  God  very  dread- 
fully. For  God  is  not  only  omniscient;  God  is 
also  so  divinely  brave  that  He  dared  to  make 
men  and  endows  them  with  free  will.  And  by 
the  terms  timidity  and  ignorance  it  should  be 
carefully  observed  that  humility  and  mere  lack 
of  education  are  not  intended.  There  is  room 
for  a  certain  confusion  here.  Many  a  person 
who  is  simply  timid  thinks  he  is  endowed  with 
a  blessed  humility.  Many  a  one  is  learned  and 
even  scholarly,  and  at  the  same  time  wofully 
ignorant  of  what  is  going  on  in  the  garden  of 
the  Lord.  Many  of  us  will  question  the  quality 
of  a  piece  of  cloth  while  swallowing  untested 
the  statement  that  God  did  command  the  in- 
vaders of  Canaan  to  put  to  the  sword  all  liv- 
ing creatures  in  Jericho,  and  find  no  trace  of 
difficulty  in  the  matter,  even  though  within  ten 
minutes  they  may  hear  it  said  that  God  so  loved 
the  world  that  He  gave  His  Only  Begotten  Son. 
This  is  ignorance ;  the  kind  which  crumbles  be- 


166   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

fore  the  crudest  of  criticism  and  takes  refuge 
in  the  formula  that  with  God  all  things  are 
possible ! 

This  kind  of  ignoramus  may  have  at  his  fing- 
er's ends  an  encyclopaedic  knowledge  of  Greek 
prepositions,  and  the  characteristics  of  all  the 
early  heresies,  yet  remain  unaware  that  liis 
own  son  has  abandoned  his  belief  in  God !  There 
are  not  a  few  accredited  leaders  who  (like  the 
people  in  Tudor  Jenks'  fable,  ''The  Statue") 
are  so  taken  up  with  admiration  of  the  statue 
which  stands  in  the  great  square  of  their  city 
that  they  would  fail  to  recognize  the  subject  of 
the  statue  if  he  should  walk  among  them  in  the 
flesh.  There  are  prominent  churchmen  who  do 
not  realize  that  the  Church  of  God  must  move 
forward  all  along  the  battle-line,  acquire  new 
glories  and  beauties  and  revive  old  ones! 
Such  are  satisfied,  in  one  field  of  endeavor,  to 
give  old  clothes  to  a  man  out  of  work ;  while  in 
another  they  are  apt  to  believe  that  churchty 
ceremonial  attains  its  consummation  of  excel- 
lence in  the  parade  of  the  vestry  with  the  alms 
during  sung  mattins  on  a  Sunday  morning. 
They  are  delighted  with  their  accomplishment 
when  the  pupils  of  the  Church  School  have 
learned  to  enumerate  the  list  of  the  kings  of 
Israel  and  the  places  visited  by  St.  Paul  on  his 
second  missionary  journey,  as  though  these 
matters  were  the  gist  of  the  Christian  Religion. 
They  would  be  glad,  of  course,  to  "minister  to 
the  Italians,"  but  there  are  so  many  things  in 
the  way!  The  present  congregation  probably 
Avouldn't  like  to  have  the  church  invaded;  and 
then — the  germs !    The  children  couldn  't  be  ex- 


SAMPLE  CHRISTIANS  167 

pected  to  come  to  the  Clmrcli  School  if  there 
were  Italians  there,  naturally.  ''Altar  lights? 
Candles?  Yes,  oh,  yes,  entirely  fitting  and  very 
dignified ;  but  then  there  is  Miss  W. — her  uncle, 
— a  very  saintly  character — was  a  vestrjTQan 
here  for  forty-three  years,  and  it  is  quite  cer- 
tain that  she  wouldn't  like  it;  she  would  un- 
doubtedly be  offended  I — well,  disturbed,  then, 
and  that  would  never  do!" 
,  Of  course,  the  minds  of  these  timid  folk  are 
simply  closed  to  the  needs  of  the  ninety-and- 
nine  just  persons  who  are  alive  in  their  com- 
munity, but  who  have  not  been  attraced  by  the 
Church  as  they  might  be  if  the  Church,  as 
locally  represented,  did  not  continue  to  hold  in 
solution,  and  hence  latent,  a  great  part  of  what 
the  Church  should  be  teaching  and  doing.  Ig- 
norance and  timidity  do  not  make  any  great 
appeal  to  people  who  are  alive.  One  can  be 
"other-worldly"  and  yet  take  an  intelligent 
interest  in  aerial  freight  transportation.  One 
inay  be  self-immolating  to  the  last  degree,  yet 
^insist  upon  truthfulness  and  reverence  and 
order.  Even  in  a  petrified  community  there  is 
no  singular  merit  in  being  conservative  for  the 
sake  of  being  conservative.  It  is  the  man,  and 
especially  the  pastor,  the  spiritual  leader  and 
guide,  who  respects  his  responsibilities  and  his 
community  enough  to  turn  the  community  in- 
side out  if  necessary,  who  is  truly  worthy  the 
regard  of  the  community,  and  who  wins  that 
regard  because  he  earns  it.  One  whose  lot  may 
be  cast  and  whose  life  must  be  led  as  leader 
and  guide  among  the  backward  and  the  timid 
and  the  ignorant  must,  more  than  any  other, 


168   THE  GARDEN  OF  THE  LORD 

demonstrate  wliat  Christianity  has  done  for 
him  to  make  him  courageous  and  wise  and  clean 
and  gentle  and  strong  and  unselfish.  His  Gos- 
pel must  stand  out  like  a  tower  placed  on  a 
hill. 

It  is,  especially  in  the  ministerial  priesthood, 
leadership  that  God's  people  are  hungering  for 
— not  mere  acquiescence  in  the  foibles  of  the 
spiritually  narrow-minded.  It  is  not  the  gard- 
ener who  saunters  about,  nodding  to  the  pop- 
pies as  they  swing  in  the  breeze,  who  makes  his 
garden  groAv. 

If  the  priest  rise  to  the  opportunity  which 
God  has  given  him,  the  garden  which  is  liis  in 
trust  to  cultivate  must  blossom  and  bear  fruit. 
He  must  implant  in  the  soil  of  the  heart  among 
his  people  the  seed  of  a  glorious  vision  to  which 
they  will  be  moved  to  reach  up,  even  though  it 
transcends  their  comprehension  when  it  bursts 
into  bloom;  but  at  the  very  least  they  will  learn 
to  look  up  and  not  be  afraid. 


Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Libraries 


1    1012   01208   3368 


Date  Due 

WR?.  'I"y 

9 

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